“Hello, Miranda.”
“I’d like to talk to you later about lucid dreaming,” Miranda said gracelessly, reddening more. “About the neurochemical effects on the brain. I’ve done some studies, you might be interested in the results, a chance to look at your art from the scientific side…” Leisha recognized the girl’s babbling for what it was: a gift. She was offering Drew what she conceived to be the best part of herself, her work.
“Thank you,” Drew said gravely. His eyes sparkled. “I’d like that.”
Leisha was amazed at herself. She had wondered if she would feel a brief, mild stab of jealousy at Drew’s defection from her to Miri—it had been all too obvious how ready he was to defect—but what she did feel was not brief or mild. Nor was it jealousy. Protectiveness flared in her like brush fire. If Drew was just using this extraordinary child to get to Sanctuary, she would flatten him. Completely. Miri deserved better, needed better, was better than that—
Astonished at herself, Leisha fell silent.
Miri smiled a second time. Her hand was still in Drew’s. “You changed our lives, Mr. Arlen. I’ll tell you later.”
“Please. And call me Drew.”
Leisha saw a dirty ten-year-old with reckless green eyes and appalling manners: I’m gonna own Sanctuary, me. She looked again at Miranda, the girl’s dark hair falling forward to hide her red face, the misshappen head. The brush fire raged. Miranda withdrew her hand from Drew’s.
“I think,” Ricky Sharifi said, “that Miri needs to eat again soon. Her metabolism differs from ours. Leisha, we’re going to be a great drain on your resources. Let us pay for it. You haven’t even seen what Terry and Nikos and Diane will do to your communications equipment.”
Ricky also had been watching Miranda and Drew. He looked at Leisha and smiled ruefully. Leisha saw that Ricky, too, was as afraid of his daughter’s powers as Leisha had been of Drew’s lucid dreaming, and as secretly proud.
“I wish,” Leisha said directly to Ricky, “that you had known my sister Alice. She died last year.”
He seemed to see as much in this simple statement as she intended. “I wish I had, too.”
Miri returned to the question of payment. “And once your—our—government satisfies itself enough to release our assets, we’ll all be rich by your standards. In fact, I was going to ask you if you would be interested in doing the legal work to help a number of us set up corporations registered in New Mexico. Most of us have run businesses or done commercial research, you know, but here we’re underage. We’re going to need legal structures to let us continue our businesses as part-time employees of corporate entities with adults named as CEO’s.”
“That wasn’t ever my field,” Leisha said carefully. “But I can suggest someone who could do it. Kevin Baker.”
“No. He was the liaison for Sanctuary.”
“Was he always honest?” Leisha said.
“Yes, but—”
“He would be for you, too.” And willing—Kevin was always willing to go where the business was.
Miri said, “I’ll bring it up with the others.” Leisha had already observed her with the other Superbrights, trading glances for which, Leisha knew, she was missing most of the meaning. Volumes worth of meaning she would never see. And how much more meaning she would never see was there in the string-globes they constructed for each other, or in the string-globes in their alien minds?
The string-globes that reminded her so uncomfortably of the shapes in Drew’s lucid dreaming.
“But even if we use Kevin Baker,” Miri continued, “we’ll still need a lawyer. Will you represent us?”
“Thank you, but I can’t,” Leisha said. She didn’t tell Miri why not. Not just yet. “But I can recommend some good lawyers. Justine Sutter, for instance. She’s the daughter of a very old friend of mine.”
“A Sleeper?” Miri said.
“She’s very good,” Leisha said. “And that’s what counts, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Miri said. And then, “A Sleeper.”
Ricky Sharifi said, “That might actually be best. Your lawyers are going to have to deal with United States property laws, after all. A beggar might know them best.”
Leisha said, “If you’re going to live here, Ricky, you’re going to have to stop using that word. Like that, anyway.”
After a moment Ricky said, “Yes. You’re right.”
Just like that. Jennifer Sharifi’s son, brought up in Sanctuary. And human beings thought they understood genetic manipulation!
Drew said abruptly to Miri, “Are you going to inherit Sanctuary someday?”
Miranda looked at him for a long time. Leisha couldn’t tell—nothing, not a clue—what was in the girl’s mind. “Yes,” Miri said finally, thoughtfully. “Although not for a very long time. Maybe a century. Or more. But someday, yes. I am.”
Drew didn’t answer. A century or more, Leisha thought. A look passed between Drew and Miri, a look Leisha couldn’t interpret. She had no idea at all what it meant when Drew finally smiled.
“Good enough,” he said.
Miri smiled, too.
26
Leisha sat on her favorite flat rock under the shade of a cottonwood tree. The creek at her feet was completely dry. A quarter mile downstream a Super moved slowly, face bent forward over the ground. It must be Joanna; she had become fascinated with fossils and was constructing a three-dimensional thought string which Leisha didn’t understand about the relation of coprolites to orbitals. It was poetry, Miri said, adding that none of them built poetry before they began lucid dreaming. That was the phrase she used: “built poetry.”
A kangaroo rat burrowed into a mound of dry earth a few feet away. Leisha watched it whir its short forelegs like a mechanical auger, then kick away the excavated dirt with long hind legs. The rat turned suddenly and looked at her: round ears and rounder, bulging, lustrous-black eyes. It had an odd bump on the top of its head: an incipient tumor, Leisha thought. The little animal returned to its work, incidentally aerating the soil and enriching it with nitrates from its droppings. Beyond, away from the cottonwood shade, the desert shimmered under heat already fierce in early June.
If she turned around, Leisha knew, she would see a different kind of shimmer. Forty feet above the compound, air molecules were distorted with a new kind of energy field Terry was experimenting with. It would, he said, be the next breakthrough in applied physics. Kevin Baker was in negotiation with Samsung, IBM, and Konig-Rottsler for selective licensing of Terry’s patents.
Leisha wriggled out of her boots and socks. This was mildly dangerous; she was beyond the area swept electronically clear of scorpions. But the rock, warm here even in the shade, felt pleasantly gritty under her bare feet. Suddenly she remembered studying her feet the morning of her sixty-seventh birthday. How odd—what a strange thing to remember. The memory actually pleased her; she had only just begun to realize how much, in eighty-three years, even a Sleepless forgot.
The Supers remembered everything. Always.
Leisha was waiting for Miri to explode out of the compound to accuse her. The explosion was already overdue; Miri must have been locked longer than usual in her lab. Or perhaps she was with Drew, home only a few days after his spring tour. If so they would be in his room; Miri’s didn’t have a bed.
The kangaroo rat disappeared into his mound.
“Leisha!”
Leisha turned. A figure in green shorts was running furiously toward her from the compound, arms and legs pumping. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three—
“Leisha! Why?”
The Supers always finished things before you expected them to.