Jeanine Carter, almost as long-legged and slim as Leisha, was training for the Olympics in ice skating. She practiced twelve hours a day, hours no Sleeper still in high school could ever have. So far the newspapers had not picked up the story. Jeanine was afraid that if they did, they would somehow not let her compete.
Jack Bellingham, like Leisha, would start college in September. Unlike Leisha, he had already started his career. The practice of law had to wait for law school; the practice of investing required only money. Jack didn’t have much, but his precise financial analyses parlayed six hundred dollars saved from summer jobs to three thousand dollars through stock-market investing, then to ten thousand dollars, and then he had enough to qualify for information-fund speculation. Jack was fifteen, not old enough to make legal investments; the transactions were all in the name of Kevin Baker, the oldest of the Sleepless, who lived in Austin. Jack told Leisha, “When I hit eighty-four percent profit over two consecutive quarters, the data analysts logged onto me. Just sniffing. Well, that’s their job, even when the overall amounts are actually small. It’s the patterns they care about. If they take the trouble to cross-reference data banks and come up with the fact that Kevin is a Sleepless, will they try to stop us from investing somehow?”
“That’s paranoid,” Leisha said.
“No, it’s not,” Jeanine said. “Leisha, you don’t know.”
“You mean because I’ve been protected by my father’s money and caring,” Leisha said. No one grimaced; all of them confronted ideas openly, without shadowy allusions. Without dreams.
“Yes,” Jeanine said. “Your father sounds terrific. And he raised you to think that achievement should not be fettered — Jesus Christ, he’s a Yagaiist. Well, good. We’re glad for you.” She said it without sarcasm. Leisha nodded. “But the world isn’t always like that. They hate us.”
“That’s too strong,” Carol said. “Not hate.”
“Well, maybe,” Jeanine said. “But they’re different from us. We’re better, and they naturally resent that.”
“I don’t see what’s natural about it,” Tony said. “Why shouldn’t it be just as natural to admire what’s better? We do. Does any one of us resent Kenzo Yagai for his genius? Or Nelson Wade, the physicist? Or Catherine Raduski?”
“We don’t resent them because we are better,” Richard said. “Q.E.D.”
“What we should do is have our own society,” Tony said. “Why should we allow their regulations to restrict our natural, honest achievements? Why should Jeanine be barred from skating against them and Jack from investing on their same terms just because we’re Sleepless? Some of them are brighter than others of them. Some have greater persistence. Well, we have greater concentration, more biochemical stability, and more time. All men are not created equal.”
“Be fair, Jack — no one has been barred from anything yet,” Jeanine said.
“But we will be.”
“Wait,” Leisha said. She was deeply troubled by the conversation. “I mean, yes, in many ways we’re better. But you quoted out of context, Tony. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t say all men are created equal in ability. It’s talking about rights and power; it means that all are created equal under the law. We have no more right to a separate society or to being free of society’s restrictions than anyone else does. There’s no other way to freely trade one’s efforts, unless the same contractual rules apply to all.”
“Spoken like a true Yagaiist,” Richard said, squeezing her hand.
“That’s enough intellectual discussion for me,” Carol said, laughing. “We’ve been at this for hours. We’re at the beach, for Chrissake. Who wants to swim with me?”
“I do,” Jeanine said. “Come on, Jack.”
All of them rose, brushing sand off their suits, discarding sunglasses. Richard pulled Leisha to her feet. But just before they ran into the water, Tony put his skinny hand on her arm. “One more question, Leisha. Just to think about. If we achieve better than most other people, and if we trade with the Sleepers when it’s mutually beneficial, making no distinction there between the strong and the weak — what obligation do we have to those so weak they don’t have anything to trade with us? We’re already going to give more than we get; do we have to do it when we get nothing at all? Do we have to take care of their deformed and handicapped and sick and lazy and shiftless with the products of our work?”
“Do the Sleepers have to?” Leisha countered.
“Kenzo Yagai would say no. He’s a Sleeper.”
“He would say they would receive the benefits of contractual trade even if they aren’t direct parties to the contract. The whole world is better fed and healthier because of Y-energy.”
“Come on!” Jeanine yelled. “Leisha, they’re ducking me! Jack, you stop that! Leisha, help me!”
Leisha laughed. Just before she grabbed for Jeanine, she caught the look on Richard’s face, and on Tony’s: Richard frankly lustful, Tony angry. At her. But why? What had she done, except argue in favor of dignity and trade?
Then Jack threw water on her, and Carol pushed Jack into the warm spray, and Richard was there with his arms around her, laughing.
When she got the water out of her eyes, Tony was gone.
Midnight. “Okay,” Carol said. “Who’s first?”
The six teenagers in the brambly clearing looked at each other. A Y-lamp, kept on low for atmosphere, cast weird shadows across their faces and over their bare legs. Around the clearing Roger Camden’s trees stood thick and dark, a wall between them and the closest of the estate’s outbuildings. It was very hot. August air hung heavy, sullen. They had voted against bringing an air-conditioned Y-field because this was a return to the primitive, the dangerous; let it be primitive.
Six pairs of eyes stared at the glass in Carol’s hand.
“Come on,” she said. “Who wants to drink up?” Her voice was jaunty, theatrically hard. “It was difficult enough to get this.”
“How did you get it?” said Richard, the group member — except for Tony — with the least influential family contacts, the least money. “In a drinkable form like that?”
“Jennifer got it,” Carol said, and five sets of eyes shifted to Jennifer Sharifi, who two weeks into her visit with Carol’s family was confusing them all. She was the American-born daughter of a Hollywood movie star and an Arab prince who had wanted to found a Sleepless dynasty. The movie star was an aging drug addict; the prince, who had taken his fortune out of oil and put it into Y-energy when Kenzo Yagai was still licensing his first patents, was dead. Jennifer Sharifi was richer than Leisha would someday be, and infinitely more sophisticated about procuring things. The glass held interleukin-1, an immune-system booster, one of many substances which as a side effect induced the brain to swift and deep sleep.
Leisha stared at the glass. A warm feeling crept through her lower belly, not unlike the feeling when she and Richard made love. She caught Jennifer watching her, and flushed.
Jennifer disturbed her. Not for the obvious reasons she disturbed Tony and Richard and Jack: the long black hair, the tall, slim body in shorts and halter. Jennifer didn’t laugh. Leisha had never met a Sleepless who didn’t laugh, nor one who said so little, with such deliberate casualness. Leisha found herself speculating on what Jennifer Sharifi wasn’t saying. It was an odd sensation to feel toward another Sleepless.