The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (91 page)

Susan said, “We’re going to publish next week, in the
New England Journal of Medicine
. Security has been unbelievably restricted – no leaks to the popular press. But I
want to tell you now, myself, what we found. So you’ll be prepared.”

“Go on,” Leisha said. Her chest felt tight.

“Do you remember when you and the other Sleepless kids took interleukin-l to see what sleep was like? When you were sixteen?”

“How did you know about that?”

“You kids were watched a lot more closely than you think. Remember the headache you got?”

“Yes.” She and Richard and Tony and Carol and Jeanine . . . after her rejection by the Olympic Committee, Jeanine had never skated again. She was a kindergarten teacher in Butte,
Montana.

“Interleukin-l is what I want to talk about. At least, partly. It’s one of a whole group of substances that boost the immune system. They stimulate the production of antibodies, the
activity of white blood cells, and a host of other immunoenhancements. Normal people have surges of IL-l released during the slow-wave phases of sleep. That means that they – we – are
getting boosts to the immune system during sleep. One of the questions we researchers asked ourselves twenty-eight years ago was: will Sleepless kids who don’t get those surges of IL-l get
sick more often?”

“I’ve never been sick,” Leisha said.

“Yes, you have. Chicken pox and three minor colds by the end of your fourth year,” Susan said precisely. “But in general you were all a very healthy lot. So we researchers were
left with the alternative theory of sleep-driven immunoenhancement: that the burst of immune activity existed as a counterpart to a greater vulnerability of the body in sleep to disease, probably
in some way connected to the fluctuations in body temperature during REM sleep. In other words, sleep
caused
the immune vulnerability that endogenous pyrogens like IL-l counteract. Sleep was
the problem; immune-system enhancements were the solution. Without sleep, there would be no problem. Are you following this?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you are. Stupid question.” Susan brushed her hair off her face. It was going gray at the temples. There was a tiny brown age spot beneath her right ear.

“Over the years we collected thousands – maybe hundreds of thousands – of Single Photon Emission Tomography scans of you and the other kids’ brains, plus endless EEGs,
samples of cerebrospinal fluid, and all the rest of it. But we couldn’t really see inside your brains, really know what’s going on in there. Until Bernie Kuhn hit that
embankment.”

“Susan,” Leisha said, “give it to me straight. Without more buildup.”

“You’re not going to age.”

“What?”

“Oh, cosmetically, yes. Gray hair, wrinkles, sags. But the absence of sleep peptides and all the rest of it affects the immune and tissue-restoration systems in ways we don’t
understand. Bernie Kuhn had a perfect liver. Perfect lungs, perfect heart, perfect lymph nodes, perfect pancreas, perfect medulla oblongata. Not just healthy or young –
perfect
.
There’s a tissue-regeneration enhancement that clearly derives from the operation of the immune system but is radically different from anything we ever suspected. Organs show no wear and tear
– not even the minimal amount expected in a seventeen-year-old. They just repair themselves, perfectly, on and on . . . and on.”

“For how long?” Leisha whispered.

“Who the hell knows? Bernie Kuhn was young – maybe there’s some compensatory mechanism that cuts in at some point and you’ll all just collapse, like an entire fucking
gallery of Dorian Grays. But I don’t think so. Neither do I think it can go on forever, no tissue regeneration can do that. But a long, long time.”

Leisha stared at the blurred reflections in the car windshield. She saw her father’s face against the blue satin of his casket, banked with white roses. His heart, unregenerated, had given
out.

Susan said, “The future is all speculative at this point. We know that the peptide structures that build up the pressure to sleep in normal people resemble the components of bacterial cell
walls. Maybe there’s a connection between sleep and pathogen receptivity. We don’t know. But ignorance never stopped the tabloids. I wanted to prepare you because you’re going to
get called supermen,
Homo perfectus
, who all knows what. Immortal.”

The two women sat in silence. Finally Leisha said, “I’m going to tell the others. On our datanet. Don’t worry about the security. Kevin Baker designed Groupnet; nobody knows
anything we don’t want them to.”

“You’re that well organized already?”

“Yes.”

Susan’s mouth worked. She looked away from Leisha. “We better go in. You’ll miss your flight.”

“Susan . . .”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Susan said, and in her voice Leisha heard the thing she had seen before in Susan’s expression and not been able to name: it was longing.

Tissue regeneration. A long, long time
, sang the blood in Leisha’s ears on the flight to Boston.
Tissue regeneration
. And, eventually:
immortal
. No,
not that, she told herself severely. Not that. The blood didn’t listen.

“You sure smile a lot,” said the man next to her in first class, a business traveler who had not recognized Leisha. “You coming from a big party in Chicago?”

“No. From a funeral.”

The man looked shocked, then disgusted. Leisha looked out the window at the ground far below. Rivers like microcircuits, fields like neat index cards. And on the horizon fluffy white clouds like
masses of exotic flowers, blooms in a conservatory filled with light.

The letter was no thicker than any hard-copy mail, but hard-copy mail addressed by hand to either of them was so rare that Richard was nervous. “It might be
explosive.” Leisha looked at the letter on their hall credenza.
MS. LIESHA CAMDEN
. Block letters, misspelled.

“It looks like a child’s writing,” she said.

Richard stood with head lowered, legs braced apart. But his expression was only weary. “Perhaps deliberately like a child’s. You’d be more open to a child’s writing, they
might have figured.”

“‘They’? Richard, are we getting that paranoid?”

He didn’t flinch from the question. “Yes. For the time being.”

A week earlier the
New England Journal of Medicine
had published Susan’s careful, sober article. An hour later the broadcast and datanet news had exploded in speculation, drama,
outrage, and fear. Leisha and Richard, along with all the Sleepless on the Groupnet, had tracked and charted each of four components, looking for a dominant reaction: speculation (“The
Sleepless may live for centuries, and this might lead to the following events . . .”); drama (“If a Sleepless marries only Sleepers, he may have lifetime enough for a dozen brides
– and several dozen children, a bewildering blended family . . .”); outrage (“Tampering with the law of nature has only brought among us unnatural so-called people who will live
with the unfair advantage of time: time to accumulate more kin, more power, more property than the rest of us could ever know . . .”); and fear (“How soon before the Super-race takes
over?”).

“They’re all fear, of one kind or another,” Carolyn Rizzolo finally said, and the Groupnet stopped their differentiated tracking.

Leisha was taking the final exams of her last year of law school. Each day comments followed her to the campus, along the corridors, and in the classroom; each day she forgot them in the
grueling exam sessions, all students reduced to the same status of petitioner to the great university. Afterward, temporarily drained, she walked silently back home to Richard and the Groupnet,
aware of the looks of people on the street, aware of her bodyguard, Bruce, striding between her and them.

“It will calm down,” Leisha said. Richard didn’t answer.

The town of Salt Springs, Texas, passed a local ordinance that no Sleepless could obtain a liquor license, on the grounds that civil rights statutes were built on the “all men were created
equal” clause of the Declaration of Independence and Sleepless clearly were not covered. There were no Sleepless within a hundred miles of Salt Springs, and no one had applied for a new
liquor license there for the past ten years, but the story was picked up by United Press and by Datanet News, and within twenty-four hours heated editorials appeared, on both sides of the issue,
across the nation.

More local ordinances appeared. In Pollux, Pennsylvania, the Sleepless could be denied apartment rental on the grounds that their prolonged wakefulness would increase both wear and tear on the
landlord’s property and utility bills. In Cranston Estates, California, Sleepless were barred from operating twenty-four-hour businesses: “unfair competition.” Iroquois County,
New York, barred them from serving on county juries, arguing that a jury containing Sleepless, with their skewed idea of time, did not constitute “a jury of one’s peers.”

“All those statutes will be thrown out in superior courts,” Leisha said. “But, God, the waste of money and docket time to do it!” A part of her mind noticed that her tone
as she said this was Roger Camden’s.

The state of Georgia, in which some sex acts between consenting adults were still a crime, made sex between a Sleepless and a Sleeper a third-degree felony, classing it with bestiality.

Kevin Baker had designed software that scanned the newsnets at high speed, flagged all stories involving discrimination or attacks on Sleepless, and categorized them by type. The files were
available on Groupnet. Leisha read through them, then called Kevin. “Can’t you create a parallel program to flag defenses of us? We’re getting a skewed picture.”

“You’re right,” Kevin said, a little startled. “I didn’t think of it.”

“Think of it,” Leisha said, grimly. Richard, watching her, said nothing.

She was most upset by the stories about Sleepless children. Shunned at school, verbal abuse by siblings, attacks by neighborhood bullies, confused resentment from parents who had wanted an
exceptional child but had not bargained on one who might live centuries. The school board of Gold River, Iowa, voted to bar Sleepless children from conventional classrooms because their rapid
learning “created feelings of inadequacy in others, interfering with their education.” The board made funds available for Sleepless to have tutors at home. There were no volunteers
among the teaching staff. Leisha started spending as much time on Groupnet with the kids, talking to them all night long, as she did studying for her bar exams, scheduled for July.

Stella Bevington stopped using her modem.

Kevin’s second program catalogued editorials urging fairness toward Sleepless. The school board of Denver set aside funds for a program in which gifted children, including the Sleepless,
could use their talents and build teamwork through tutoring even younger children. Rive Beau, Louisiana, elected Sleepless Danielle du Cherney to the city council, although Danielle was twenty-two
and technically too young to qualify. The prestigious medical research firm of Halley-Hall gave much publicity to their hiring of Christopher Amren, a Sleepless with a Ph.D. in cellular
physics.

Dora Clarq, a Sleepless in Dallas, opened a letter addressed to her, and a plastic explosive blew off her arm.

Leisha and Richard stared at the envelope on the hall credenza. The paper was thick, cream-colored, but not expensive: the kind of paper made of bulky newsprint dyed the shade of vellum. There
was no return address. Richard called Liz Bishop, a Sleepless who was majoring in criminal justice in Michigan. He had never spoken with her before – neither had Leisha – but she came
on Groupnet immediately and told them how to open it, or she could fly up and do it if they preferred. Richard and Leisha followed her directions for remote detonation in the basement of the
townhouse. Nothing blew up. When the letter was open, they took it out and read it:

Dear Ms. Camden.

You been pretty good to me and I’m sorry to do this but I quit. They are making it pretty hot for me at the union not officially but you know how it is. If I was you I wouldn’t go to
the union for another bodyguard I’d try to find one privately. But be careful. Again I’m sorry but I have to live too.

Bruce

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Leisha said. “The two of us getting all this equipment, spending hours on this set-up
so an explosive won’t detonate . . .”

“It’s not as if I at least had a whole lot else to do,” Richard said. Since the wave of anti-Sleepless sentiment, all but two of his marine-consultant clients, vulnerable to
the marketplace and thus to public opinion, had canceled their accounts.

Groupnet, still up on Leisha’s terminal, shrilled in emergency override. Leisha got there first. It was Tony.

“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.