“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, although she did, and berated herself for petty cowardice.
He made an impatient gesture—exactly how old was he now? Twenty-five. “I don’t believe you, Leisha. I want what I’ve always wanted. You and Sanctuary.”
That did catch her by surprise—half of it, anyway. Sanctuary. It had been a decade since Drew had so much as mentioned it to her. Leisha thought the childish dream of revenge or justice or conquest, or whatever it was, had faded long ago. Drew sat in his chair, a powerfully-built man despite the crippled legs, and his eyes didn’t falter when they met hers. Sanctuary.
He was a child still, in spite of everything.
She went to the north patio. Kevin stood there alone, examining a stone shaped by desert wind into a long, tapered shape like a sandstone tear. At the sight of him Leisha realized that she felt no more than she had at the sight of Richard. Age had killed Alice’s body; it seemed to have worked instead on Leisha’s heart.
“Hello, Kevin.”
He turned quickly. “Leisha. Thank you for inviting me.”
So Drew had lied to him. It didn’t seem to matter. “You’re welcome.”
“I wanted to pay my last respects to Alice.” He stood awkwardly, and finally smiled ruefully. “Sleepless aren’t very good at this, are we? At death, I mean. We never think about it.”
“I do,” Leisha said. “Would you like to see Alice now?”
“Later. First there’s something I want to say to you, and I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. The funeral’s in an hour, isn’t it?”
“Kevin—listen. I don’t want to listen to any apologies or explanations or reconstructions of events forty years old. Not now. I just don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize,” he said, a little stiffly, and Leisha suddenly remembered herself saying to Susan Melling, on the roof of this same house, Kevin doesn’t see there’s anything to forgive. “What I wanted to say to you was on a different topic altogether. I’m sorry to bring it up just before the funeral but as I said, there might not be another time. Has Drew told you what business I handle for him?”
“I didn’t know you handled any business for him.”
“Actually, I handle it all. Not his tour bookings—there’s an agency that does that—but his investments and security needs and so forth. He—”
“I should think the amount Drew makes would be pretty small compared to your usual corporate clients.”
“It is,” Kevin said, without self-consciousness, “but I do it for you. Indirectly. But what I wanted to say was that he insists I secure his investments exclusively in funds or speculations traded through Sanctuary.”
“So?”
“Most of my business is with Sanctuary anyway, but on their terms. Dealing Earth-side when they don’t want their own people to come down, and especially doing the security on their Earth-side transactions. There are still a lot of people out there who hate Sleepless, despite the benevolent social climate on the grids. You’d be surprised how many.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Leisha said. “What is it you want to tell me?”
“This: There’s something starting to happen on Sanctuary. I don’t know what it is, but I’m in a unique position to see the outer fringes of their planning for whatever it is. Especially through Drew’s tiny investments because he wants them as close into the heart of Sanctuary dealings as they’ll permit. Which, incidentally, was never very close, and now it’s getting even more distant. They’re liquidating whenever they can, converting investments not to credit but to equipment and to tangibles like gold, software, even art. That’s what my watchdog program flagged in the first place: There’s never been a Sleepless who collected art seriously. We’re just not interested.”
This was true. Leisha frowned.
Kevin continued, “So I went on digging, even in areas I don’t handle. The security is harder to crack than it used to be; they must have some very good younger wizards up there, although there’s no formal record of it anywhere. Sanctuary’s spent the last year moving all investment it doesn’t liquidate into holdings outside the United States. Will Sandaleros bought a Japanese orbital, Kagura, a very old one with a lot of internal damage, used mostly for genetic breeding experiments on altered meat animals for the luxury orbital trade. Sandaleros bought it in the name of Sharifi Enterprises, not of Sanctuary. They’ve acted strange with it—they evicted all the tenants but there’s no record of moving out any of the livestock. Not so much as a single disease-resistant goatow. Presumably they brought their own people in to care for the animals, but I can’t crack any of those records. And now they’ve started to move all their people on Earth back up to Sanctuary. The kids at grad school, the doctors doing residencies, the business liaisons, even the occasional kook who’s down here slumming. They’re all going back to Sanctuary, by ones and twos, inconspicuously. But they’re all going back.”
Leisha frowned. “What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.” Kevin put down the wind-sculpted stone. “I thought you might be able to guess. You knew Jennifer better than any of us left here.”
“Kev, I don’t think I ever really knew anybody in my life.” It just slipped out; she hadn’t planned to say anything so personal. Kevin smiled thinly.
Drew drove his chair onto the patio. His eyes were red. “Leisha, Stella wants you.”
She went, her mind full of Sanctuary’s movements, of Alice’s death, of the exploitive congressional tax package, of Drew’s investing in Sanctuary, of Kevin’s concern, of her irrational fear of Drew’s art—it was irrational, she knew that. She didn’t seem to have the energy to stay rational that she’d had when she was younger. There was no way to think about so many things at once. They were too different. The human mind could not encompass them. A different way of thinking was needed. Daddy, you failed—you should have provided that in the genemod, too. A better way of integrating thought, not just better thoughts.
Leisha smiled, without mirth. Poor Roger. Blamed for everything Alice wasn’t, everything Leisha was, everything Leisha wasn’t. It was funny, in a way. But only in the unhumorous way anything recent was funny. In another eighty years, maybe she would find it hilarious. All it took was enough time, piling up like dust.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”
It was Jordan who had chosen the beautiful, painful, sentimental words, Drew knew. Drew had never heard the funeral service before and he wasn’t sure what all the archaic phrases meant, but looking at the faces gathered around Alice Camden Watrous’s grave, he was sure that Jordan had chosen the words, Leisha disliked them, and Stella was impatient with them. And Alice? She would have liked them, Drew knew, because her son had chosen them. That would be enough for Alice. And so for Drew, too.
Shapes slid quietly in and out of his conscious mind.
For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
It was Eric who read the words—Alice’s grandson, Drew’s old enemy. Drew looked at the handsome, solemn man Eric had become, and the shapes in his mind deepened, slithered faster. No, not shapes, this time he wanted the word. He was determined to find the word for Eric, who might be dust but if so only a high-quality real-leather solid-platinum dust that would never be passed over and known no more because Eric was a Sleepless, born to ability and power, no matter how much youthful rebellion he had acted out once. Drew wanted the word for Richard, eyes downcast beside his Sleeper wife and little boy, pretending he was like them. The word for Jordan, Alice’s son, torn in two all his life between his Sleeper mother and brilliant Sleepless aunt, defended only by his own decency. The word for Leisha, who had loved—if what Kevin Baker had told Drew was true—Sleepers far more than she had ever loved any of her own kind. Her father. Alice. Drew himself.