A hundred feet of genemod greenery, flowers and bushes and trees, all of it part of the project. Plants grew right to the water’s edge. When the sea threatened, a Y-shield switched on, capable of protecting even the most fragile genemod rose from a hurricane. Beyond the garden, the compound walls rose abruptly, thin as paper, stronger than diamonds. Miri told me they were only a dozen molecules thick, constructed by second-generation nano-machines that had themselves been made from nanomachines. In my mind I saw the walls’ glossy whiteness, to which no dirt could adhere, as hot dark red motion, thick and unstoppable as lava.
Nothing here was stoppable.
“Drew!” Miri ran to meet me, wearing white shorts and a loose shirt, her masses of dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She had put on red lipstick. She still looked more like sixteen than twenty-nine. She threw her arms around me in my chair, and I felt the quick beating of her heart against my cheek. Super metabolism is revved up a lot higher than ours. I kissed her.
She murmured into my hair, “This time was too long. Four months!”
“It was a good tour, Miri.”
“I know. I watched sixteen performances on the grid, and the performance stats look good.”
She nestled into my lap. Jason and Christy had discreetly vanished. We were alone in the bright, newly created garden. I stroked Miri’s hair, not wanting to hear just yet about performance stats.
Miri said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I kissed her again, this time to keep from looking at her face. It would be blinding, white hot with love. It always was, when she saw me. Always. For thirteen years. He was capable of complete obsessiveness, Leisha had said about her father. He just wore people out.
“I miss you so much when you’re away, Drew.”
“I miss you, too.” This was true.
“I wish you could stay longer than a week.”
“Me, too.” This was not true. But there were no words.
She looked at me, then, a long moment. Something shifted behind her eyes. Carefully, so as not to hurt my crippled legs, she climbed off my lap, held out her hands, and smiled. “Come see the lab work.”
I recognized this for what it was: Miri offering me the best she had. The most valuable present in the world. The thing I desperately wanted to be part of, even though I wouldn’t understand it, because not to be part of it was to be unimportant. Insignificant. She was offering me what I needed most.
I couldn’t do less.
I pulled her back onto my lap, forced my hands to move over her breasts. “Later. Can we be alone first…”
Her face was the curving shape of joy, too bright to be any color at all.
Miri’s bedroom, like every other bedroom at La Isla, was spartan. Bed, dresser, terminal, an oval green rug made of some soft material Sara Cerelli had invented. On the dresser was a green pottery vase of fragrant genemod flowers I didn’t recognize. These people, who could command all luxury, rarely indulged in any. The only jewelry Miri ever wore was the ring I had given her, a slim gold band set with rubies. I had never seen the other Sleepless wear any jewelry at all. All their extravagances, Miri had told me once, were mental. Even the light was ordinary: flat, without shadows.
I thought of the library in Leisha’s New Mexico house.
Miri unbuttoned her shirt. Her breasts looked the same as they had at sixteen: full, milky, tipped with pale brown aureoles. She pulled down her shorts. Her hips were full, her waist chunky. Her pubic hair was bushy and wiry and the same black as the hair on her head, where it was confined by a red ribbon. I reached up and pulled the ribbon free.
“Oh, Drew, I’ve missed you so much…”
I hoisted myself from my powerchair to her narrow bed, and then pulled her on top of me. Her breasts spread over my chest: soft on hard. On tour or not, I exercised my upper body fanatically, to make up for my crippled legs. Miri loved that. She liked to feel my arms crush her against me. She liked my thrusts to be hard, definite, even ramming. I tried to give her that, but this time I stayed soft.
She looked at me questioningly, brushing the wild black hair back from her face. I didn’t meet her eyes. She reached down and took me in her hand, massaging gently.
This had happened only a few times, all of them recent. Miri massaged harder.
“Drew…”
“Give me a minute, love.”
She smiled uncertainly. I tried to concentrate, and then not to concentrate.
“Drew…”
“Shhhh… just a minute.”
The gray shapes of failure snapped their teeth in my mind.
I closed my eyes, pulled Miri closer, and thought of Leisha. Leisha in the New Mexico twilight, a dim golden shape against the sunset. Leisha singing me to sleep when I was ten years old. Leisha running across the desert, slim and swift, tripping in a kangaroo-rat hole and twisting her ankle. I had carried her back to the compound, her body light and sweet in my eighteen-year-old arms. Leisha at her sister’s funeral, tears making her eyes reflect all light, naked to sorrow. Leisha naked, as I had never seen her …
“AAhhhhhh,” Miri crooned triumphantly.
I rolled us both over, so that I was on top. Miri preferred it that way. I thrust hard, then harder. She liked it really rough. Eventually I felt her shudder under me, and I let myself go.
Afterward, I lay still, my eyes closed, Miri curled against me with her head on my shoulder. For a brief piercing moment I remembered how love was between us a decade ago, in the beginning, when just the touch of her hand could turn me shivery and hot. I tried not to think, not to feel any shapes at all.
But making a void in the mind is impossible. I suddenly remembered the thing that had tugged at my mind about Jason Reynolds, Kevin Baker’s great-grandson. Last year, the kid had nearly drowned. He had taken a skimmer out on the Gulf straight into Hurricane Julio. Huevos Verdes had found him only because Terry Mwakambe had developed some esoteric homing devices, and Jason had been brought back from death only by using on him some part of the project that hadn’t even been tested yet.
When he revived, Jason admitted knowing the hurricane was coming. He wasn’t trying to commit suicide, he said earnestly. Everyone believed him; Sleepless don’t commit suicide. They’re too much in love with their own minds to end them. With all of them hanging over his bed, his parents and Kevin and Leisha and Miri and Christy and Terry, Jason had said in a small voice that he hadn’t known the sea would get quite that rough quite that fast. He just wanted to feel the boat get pitched around a lot. He just wanted to watch the huge, angry sky, and feel the rain lash him. He, a Sleepless, just wanted to feel vulnerable.
Miranda whispered, “Nobody ever makes me feel like you do, Drew. Nobody.”
I kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
In the late afternoon we went to the labs. Sara Cerelli and Jonathan Markowitz were there, dressed in shorts, barefoot. One of the requirements of the project was that at no stage did anything need to be sterile.
“Hello, Drew,” Jon said. Sara nodded. Their concentration on their work made closed, muddy shapes in my mind.
A blob of living tissue sat in a shallow open tray on a lab bench, connected to machines by slender tubes and even more slender cables. Dozens of display screens ringed the rooms. Nothing on any of them was comprehensible to me. The tissue in the tray was flesh-colored, a light dun, but no particular form. It looked as if it could change shape, oozing into something else. On my last visit, Miri had told me it couldn’t do that. No Sleepless are squeamish. I’m not either, but the shapes that crawled in and out of my mind as I looked at the thing were pale and speckled and smelled of dampness, although diamond-precise on their edges. Like the nanobuilt walls of Huevos Verdes.
I said, stupidly, “It’s alive.”