The Best of Nancy Kress (85 page)
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 board-certified doctors, you know, and four of them are thinking of coming here”—a daycare facility, a school, and an intensive-crop farm. “Most of the 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 interested Sleepless 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. For the first time, her taut body seemed to relax slightly.
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,” Jennifer said. 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 Donald 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.”
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.”
Jennifer said swiftly, “Only if free movement implies free minds,” and at her tone Leisha looked up. “I have something to tell you, Leisha.”
“What?”
“Tony isn’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“In Cattaraugus County jail in Conewango. 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. Bill Thaine has already agreed, but Tony wants you.”
“Jennifer—I don’t even take the bar exams until July!”
“He says he’ll wait. Bill 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 inscrutably. 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
….
“Bill is at the jail now,” Jennifer said. “Will you drive in with me?” She made the question a challenge.
“Yes,” Leisha said.
In Conewango, the county seat, they were not allowed to see Tony. William Thaine, as his attorney, could go in and out freely. Leisha, not officially an attorney at all, could go nowhere. This was told to 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. 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, and 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 Linus Pauling 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 past century, the gaudy excesses of the roaring twenties and the antiestablishment 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. 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, they are increasingly hated.
Does the hatred that we have seen flower so fully over the past few months really grow, as many claim, from the “unfair advantage” the Sleepless have over the rest of us in securing jobs, promotions, money, and 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
and asked 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 four 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 infighting.”
“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 named Justine, 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 the beggars were not. Yes. But it would hold.