The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (94 page)

“We won’t,” Leisha said. “Ever.” She glanced at Alice and saw Tony’s face.

Alice said, “There’s a community hospital about ten miles south of here.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was there once. Drug overdose,” Alice said briefly. She drove hunched over the wheel, with the face of someone thinking furiously. Leisha thought, too, trying to see a way around
the legal charge of kidnapping. They probably couldn’t say the child came willingly: Stella would undoubtedly cooperate, but at her age and in her condition she was probably
non sui
juris
, her word would have no legal weight . . .

“Alice, we can’t even get her into the hospital without insurance information. Verifiable on-line.”

“Listen,” Alice said, not to Leisha but over her shoulder, toward the backseat. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Stella. I’m going to tell them you’re my
daughter and you fell off a big rock you were climbing while we stopped for a snack at a roadside picnic area. We’re driving from California to Philadelphia to see your grandmother. Your name
is Jordan Watrous and you’re five years old. Got that, honey?”

“I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”

“You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March twenty-third. Can you do this, Stella?”

“Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.

Leisha stared at Alice. “Can
you
do this?”

“Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”

Alice half carried, half supported Stella into the emergency room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin
body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely
around her face.

Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower: often they uploaded from local precincts only once a
day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital.
Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.

Leisha could.

But the data file that would flash to rental agencies on Alice Camden Watrous might or might not include that she was Leisha Camden’s twin.

Leisha looked at the rows of cars in the lot. A flashy luxury Chrysler, an Ikeda van, a row of middle-class Toyotas and Mercedes, a vintage ’99 Cadillac – she could imagine the
owner’s face if that were missing – ten or twelve cheap runabouts, a hovercar with the uniformed driver asleep at the wheel. And a battered farm truck.

Leisha walked over to the truck. A man sat at the wheel, smoking. She thought of her father.

“Hello,” Leisha said.

The man rolled down his window but didn’t answer. He had greasy brown hair.

“See that hovercar over there?” Leisha said. She made her voice sound young, high. The man glanced at it indifferently; from this angle you couldn’t see that the driver was
asleep. “That’s my bodyguard. He thinks I’m in the hospital, the way my father told me to, getting this lip looked at.” She could feel her mouth swollen from Alice’s
blow.

“So?”

Leisha stamped her foot. “So I don’t want to be inside. He’s a shit and so’s Daddy. I want out. I’ll give you four thousand bank credits for your truck.
Cash.”

The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette, looked again at the hovercar. The driver’s shoulders were broad, and the car was within easy screaming distance.

“All nice and legal,” Leisha said, and tried to smirk. Her knees felt watery.

“Let me see the cash.”

Leisha backed away from the truck, to where he could not reach her. She took the money from her arm clip. She was used to carrying a lot of cash; there had always been Bruce, or someone like
Bruce. There had always been safety.

“Get out of the truck on the other side,” Leisha said, “and lock the door behind you. Leave the keys on the seat, where I can see them from here. Then I’ll put the money
on the roof where you can see it.”

The man laughed, a sound like gravel pouring. “Regular little Dabney Engh, aren’t you? Is that what they teach you society debs at your fancy schools?”

Leisha had no idea who Dabney Engh was. She waited, watching the man try to think of a way to cheat her, and tried to hide her contempt. She thought of Tony.

“All right,” he said, and slid out of the truck.

“Lock the door!”

He grinned, opened the door again, locked it. Leisha put the money on the roof, yanked open the driver’s door, clambered in, locked the door, and powered up the window. The man laughed.
She put the key into the ignition, started the truck, and drove toward the street. Her hands trembled.

She drove slowly around the block twice. When she came back, the man was gone, and the driver of the hovercar was still asleep. She had wondered if the man would wake him, out of sheer malice,
but he had not. She parked the truck and waited.

An hour and a half later Alice and a nurse wheeled Stella out of the emergency entrance. Leisha leaped out of the truck and yelled, “Coming, Alice!” waving both her arms. It was too
dark to see Alice’s expression; Leisha could only hope that Alice showed no dismay at the battered truck, that she had not told the nurse to expect a red car.

Alice said, “This is Julie Bergadon, a friend that I called while you were setting Jordan’s arm.” The nurse nodded, uninterested. The two women helped Stella into the high
truck cab; there was no backseat. Stella had a cast on her arm and looked drugged.

“How?” Alice said as they drove off.

Leisha didn’t answer. She was watching a police hovercar land at the other end of the parking lot. Two officers got out and strode purposefully toward Alice’s locked car under the
skimpy maple.

“My God,” Alice said. For the first time she sounded frightened.

“They won’t trace us,” Leisha said. “Not to this truck. Count on it.”

“Leisha.” Alice’s voice spiked with fear. “Stella’s
asleep
.”

Leisha glanced at the child, slumped against Alice’s shoulder. “No, she’s not. She’s unconscious from painkillers.”

“Is that all right? Normal? For . . . her?”

“We can black out. We can even experience substance-induced sleep.” Tony and she and Richard and Jeanine in the midnight woods . . . “Didn’t you know that,
Alice?”

“No.”

“We don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

They drove south in silence. Finally Alice said, “Where are we going to take her, Leisha?”

“I don’t know. Any one of the Sleepless would be the first place the police would check – ”

“You can’t risk it. Not the way things are,” Alice said. She sounded weary. “But all my friends are in California. I don’t think we could drive this rust bucket
that far before getting stopped.”

“It wouldn’t make it anyway.”

“What should we do?”

“Let me think.”

At an expressway exit stood a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.

There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.

Sanctuary. All of them going there or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like
Stella, who could not.

Where? With whom?

Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too-visible stepmother and was co-beneficiary of
Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at
all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did? She stood a long time in the dark phone kiosk. Then she walked to the truck. Alice was asleep, her head thrown back against
the seat. A tiny line of drool ran down her chin. Her face was white and drained in the bad light from the kiosk. Leisha walked back to the phone.

“Stewart? Stewart Sutter?”

“Yes?”

“This is Leisha Camden. Something has happened.” She told the story tersely, in bald sentences. Stewart did not interrupt.

“Leisha – ” Stewart said, and stopped.

“I need help, Stewart.” “
I’ll help you, Alice
.” “
I don’t need your help
.” A wind whistled over the dark field beside the kiosk, and
Leisha shivered. She heard in the wind the thin keen of a beggar. In the wind, in her own voice.

“All right,” Stewart said, “this is what we’ll do. I have a cousin in Ripley, New York, just over the state line from Pennsylvania on the route you’ll be driving
east. It has to be in New York; I’m licensed in New York. Take the little girl there. I’ll call my cousin and tell her you’re coming. She’s an elderly woman, was quite an
activist in her youth; her name is Janet Patterson. The town is – ”

“What makes you so sure she’ll get involved? She could go to jail. And so could you.”

“She’s been in jail so many times you wouldn’t believe it. Political protests going all the way back to Vietnam. But no one’s going to jail. I’m now your attorney
of record, I’m privileged. I’m going to get Stella declared a ward of the state. That shouldn’t be too hard with the hospital records you established in Skokie. Then she can he
transferred to a foster home in New York; I know just the place, people who are fair and kind. Then Alice – ”

“She’s resident in Illinois. You can’t – ”

“Yes, I can. Since those research findings about the Sleepless life span have come out, legislators have been railroaded by stupid constituents scared or jealous or just plain angry. The
result is a body of so-called ‘law’ riddled with contradictions, absurdities, and loopholes. None of it will stand in the long run – or at least I hope not – but in the
meantime it can all be exploited. I can use it to create the most goddamn convoluted case for Stella that anybody ever saw, and in the meantime she won’t be returned home. But that
won’t work for Alice – she’ll need an attorney licensed in Illinois.”

“We have one,” Leisha said. “Candace Holt.”

“No, not a Sleepless. Trust me on this, Leisha. I’ll find somebody good. There’s a man in – are you crying?”

“No,” Leisha said, crying.

“Ah, God,” Stewart said. “Bastards. I’m sorry all this happened, Leisha.”

“Don’t be,” Leisha said.

When she had directions to Stewart’s cousin, she walked back to the truck. Alice was still asleep, Stella still unconscious. Leisha closed the truck door as quietly as possible. The engine
balked and roared, but Alice didn’t wake. There was a crowd of people with them in the narrow and darkened cab: Stewart Sutter, Tony Indivino, Susan Melling, Kenzo Yagai, Roger Camden.

To Stewart Sutter she said, You called to inform me about the situation at Morehouse, Kennedy. You are risking your career and your cousin for Stella. And you stand to gain nothing. Like Susan
telling me in advance about Bernie Kuhn’s brain. Susan, who lost her life to Daddy’s dream and regained it by her own strength. A contract without consideration for each side is not a
contract: every first-year student knows that.

To Kenzo Yagai she said, Trade isn’t always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because
of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown – it’s an ecology. An
ecology
of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they’re not contractually bound. Does a
horse need a fish?
Yes
.

To Tony she said, Yes, there are beggars in Spain who trade nothing, give nothing, do nothing. But there are
more
than beggars in Spain. Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the
whole damn country. And you withdraw from the possibility of the ecology of help. That’s what Alice wanted, all those years ago in her bedroom. Pregnant, scared, angry, jealous, she wanted to
help
me,
and I wouldn’t let her because I didn’t need it. But I do now. And she did then. Beggars need to help as well as be helped.

And, finally, there was only Daddy left. She could
see
him, bright-eyed, holding thick-leaved exotic flowers in his strong hands. To Camden she said, You were wrong. Alice is special. Oh,
Daddy – the specialness of Alice! You were
wrong
.

As soon as she thought this, lightness filled her. Not the buoyant bubble of joy, not the hard clarity of examination, but something else: sunshine, soft through the conservatory glass, where
two children ran in and out. She suddenly felt light herself, not buoyant but translucent, a medium for the sunshine to pass clear through, on its way to somewhere else.

She drove the sleeping woman and the wounded child through the night, east, toward the state line.

John Holbrook Vance (1916– ) is one of the premier stylists of science fiction, popular world-wide and influential on other writers for six decades.
His book
The Dying Earth
(1950), set in a fantastically distant future, is one of the classics of genre science fiction. It is also one of those genre-stretching works that blur the borders
between science fiction and fantasy, in the manner of the
Weird Tales
writers of the 1920s and ’30s. He has written award-winning mysteries under his full name, and as Ellery Queen
(many of the later novels of Queen were written by SF writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Avram Davidson, and Vance). He is a huge man, a lover of hot jazz and writing, but also a carpenter by trade
who was still, in the 1980s, building and rebuilding his own house.

Vance found his writing voice early and hit his stride in the 1950s. Since then he has produced a continuing stream of exquisite work, much of it brilliant. Critics often
praise his intricacies and ironies, his subtle wit, his settings and atmospherics. Yet his characters are usually motivated by common passions, no matter how nicely expressed, and his plots are
clever. He is still writing distinctive novels of fantasy and SF and winning genre awards in the mid-1990s. He is most often at his best in the novel form, but this piece is one of his later
novellas, pure Vance compressed and distilled.