“Tony—”
“What if you walk down that street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?”
Leisha didn’t answer.
“Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?”
“It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.”
“Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: What do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?”
“You’re not—”
“What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and nonproductive needy?”
“What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.”
“Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?”
“Because…” She stopped.
“Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.”
Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer. After a moment, Tony did. The intellectual challenge was gone from his voice. He said, almost tenderly, “Come down in the spring and see the site for Sanctuary. The buildings will be going up then.”
“No,” Leisha said.
“I’d like you to.”
“No. Armed retreat is not the way.”
Tony said, “The beggars are getting nastier Leisha. As the Sleepless grow richer. And I don’t mean in money.”
“Tony—” she said, and stopped. She couldn’t think what to say.
“Don’t walk down too many streets armed with just the memory of Kenzo Yagai.”
In March, a bitterly cold March with wind whipping down the Charles River, Richard Keller came to Cambridge. Leisha had not seen him for three years. He didn’t send her word on the Groupnet that he was coming. She hurried up the walk to her townhouse, muffled to the eyes in a red wool scarf against the snowy cold, and he stood there blocking the doorway. Behind Leisha, her bodyguard tensed.
“Richard! Bruce, it’s all right, this is an old friend.”
“Hello, Leisha.”
He was heavier, sturdier-looking, with a breadth of shoulder she didn’t recognize. But the face was Richard’s, older but unchanged: dark low brows, unruly dark hair. He had grown a beard.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
Inside, she handed him a cup of coffee. “Are you here on business?” From the Groupnet she knew that he had finished his master’s and had done outstanding work in marine biology in the Caribbean but had left that a year ago and disappeared from the net.
“No. Pleasure.” He smiled suddenly, the old smile that opened up his dark face. “I almost forgot about that for a long time. Contentment, yes. We’re all good at the contentment that comes from sustained work. But pleasure? Whim? Caprice? When was the last time you did something silly, Leisha?”
She smiled. “I ate cotton candy in the shower.”
“Really? Why?”
“To see if it would dissolve in gooey pink patterns.”
“Did it?”
“Yes. Lovely ones.”
“And that was your last silly thing? When was it?”
“Last summer,” Leisha said, and laughed.
“Well, mine is sooner than that. It’s now. I’m in Boston for no other reason than the spontaneous pleasure of seeing you.”
Leisha stopped laughing. “That’s an intense tone for a spontaneous pleasure, Richard.”
“Yup,” he said, intensely. She laughed again. He didn’t.
“I’ve been in India, Leisha. And China and Africa. Thinking, mostly. Watching. First I traveled like a Sleeper, attracting no attention. Then I set out to meet the Sleepless in India and China. There are a few, you know, whose parents were willing to come here for the operation. They pretty much are accepted and left alone. I tried to figure out why desperately poor countries — by our standards anyway; over there Y-energy is mostly available only in big cities — don’t have any trouble accepting the superiority of Sleepless, whereas Americans, with more prosperity than any time in history, build in resentment more and more.”
Leisha said, “Did you figure it out?”
“No. But I figured out something else, watching all those communes and villages and kampongs. We are too individualistic.”
Disappointment swept Leisha. She saw her father’s face: Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort… She reached for Richard’s cup. “More coffee?”
He caught her wrist and looked up into her face. “Don’t misunderstand me, Leisha. I’m not talking about work. We are too much individuals in the rest of our lives. Too emotionally rational. Too much alone. Isolation kills more than the free flow of ideas. It kills joy.”
He didn’t let go of her wrist. She looked down into his eyes, into depths she hadn’t seen before. It was the feeling of looking into a mineshaft, both giddy and frightening, knowing that at the bottom might be gold or darkness. Or both.
Richard said softly, “Stewart?”
“Over long ago. An undergraduate thing.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.
“Kevin?”
“No, never — we’re just friends.”
“I wasn’t sure. Anyone?”
“No.”
He let go of her wrist. Leisha peered at him timidly. He suddenly laughed. “Joy, Leisha.” An echo sounded in her mind, but she couldn’t place it, and then it was gone and she laughed too, a laugh airy and frothy and pink cotton candy in summer.
“Come home, Leisha. He’s had another heart attack.”
Susan Melling’s voice on the phone was tired. Leisha said, “How bad?”
“The doctors aren’t sure. Or say they’re not sure. He wants to see you. Can you leave your studies?”
It was May, the last push toward her finals. The Law Review proofs were behind schedule. Richard had started a new business, marine consulting to Boston fishermen plagued with sudden inexplicable shifts in ocean currents, and was working twenty hours a day. “I’ll come,” Leisha said.
Chicago was colder than Boston. The trees were half-budded. On Lake Michigan, filling the huge east windows of her father’s house, whitecaps tossed up cold spray. Leisha saw that Susan was living in the house; her brushes were on Camden’s dresser, her journals on the credenza in the foyer.
“Leisha,” Camden said. He looked old. Grey skin, sunken cheeks, the fretful and bewildered look of men who accepted potency like air, indivisible from their lives. In the corner of the room, on a small eighteenth-century slipper chair, sat a short, stocky woman with brown braids.
“Alice.”
“Hello, Leisha.”
“Alice. I’ve looked for you…” The wrong thing to say. Leisha had looked, but not very hard, deterred by the knowledge that Alice had not wanted to be found. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Alice said. She seemed remote, gentle, unlike the angry Alice of six years ago in the raw Pennsylvania hills. Camden moved painfully on the bed. He looked at Leisha with eyes which, she saw, were undimmed in their blue brightness.
“I asked Alice to come. And Susan. Susan came a while ago. I’m dying, Leisha.”