I’m not stupid. But all I say is, “Yes.”
“We Sleepless don’t dream, obviously. But we do all the other methods of imagining alternate reality. Better, in fact, than you do. So the basic ability gets ample exercise.
“Now consider canine species. They evolved from wolves, but they’re not wolves. They’ve been domesticated by humans for at least twenty thousand years. During that time—did you hear something?”
“No,” I say. Her eyes dart toward the door, then the wallscreen. She pushes her hair back.
She’s waiting for something, and jumpy as a cat. But she goes on.
“During the time the dog was domesticated, it developed the ability to do as humans do, and visualize an altered reality. To some undefined extent, anyway. A dog doesn’t just remember its master. And it doesn’t just respond to Pavlovian conditioning, either. There’s evidence from advanced neurological imagining that parts of a dog’s brain activate when the animal interacts with humans. When, for instance, a human pets a dog, the dog actually pictures itself in an alternate reality with the human. Maybe at home in front of a fire. Maybe rolling around on the ground playing. There’s no way to deduce specifics, but the chemical, electromagnetic, and cerebral imaging evidence is all quite strong.”
I nod, listening hard, making sure I understand it all.
“And there’s one more piece of research that’s relevant here. These same brain functions go on during REM sleep, when dogs dream. That, too, is an imaging of alternate reality, as I already said.”
She looks at me like she thinks I don’t remember. I nod, hating her, to show I do. Tony Indivino wasn’t like this.
“Here is the crucial piece. In sleepless canines, there’s no REM sleep. When that’s removed, so is dreaming. And when dogs don’t dream, the alternate-reality imagining slowly disappears from their brain scans. The function is still there when they’re born, but over the next several months it fades. Without reinforcement from dreaming, imagination—as humans know the term—disappears. Without imagination, the bond with man weakens and the older limbic behavior takes over. Dreaming made all the difference. Its absence is what killed your sister.”
I struggle to understand. “You mean… because the dog couldn’t imagine people and dogs together in ways that weren’t happening at just that minute… it wouldn’t take its training and it didn’t care about Precious? She died because Leisha’s pup couldn’t dream—”
“What?” Jennifer says sharply. “Who couldn’t dream?”
I remember that she and Leisha Camden, who Donna named the pup after, are enemies. They have different dreams for the Sleepless. Jennifer wants them all in Sanctuary; Leisha wants them to live outside in the real world with us, the inferior animals.
“The dog,” I stumble on, “my sister named the pups, my other sister, not me—”
“That’s all I have to tell you, Ms. Benson,” Jennifer Sharifi says. She stands crisply. “I hope the information explains what happened. Sanctuary is sorry for your loss. If you’ll step back into the security elevator—”
“No, wait! You didn’t tell me what I have to know!”
“I’ve told you all I can. Good-bye.”
“But I need to know the name and location of the company that sold Daddy the embryos! They were called Arrowgene then, but now I can’t track them on the Subnet, they’ve changed their name or shut down… but I have their truckers’ business records! Only they’re in code and I don’t know anybody else who could figure out—”
“I can’t give you that information. Good-bye, Ms. Benson.”
I spring toward her. It’s a mistake. I hit an invisible barrier that’s apparently been there the whole time, unseen. It doesn’t hurt me, but I can’t move any farther toward Jennifer Sharifi.
She turns. “If you don’t get into the elevator, Ms. Benson, the field will carefully push you into it. And don’t bother leaving any more messages for Tony. He’s not here, and if he were, he would tell you that Sanctuary is about survival. Not revenge.”
She leaves. The Y-field pushes me into the security box and then opens on the other side, and I’m back in the Allegheny hills.
Later that day, on a bus going home, I hear on vid that Sleepless activist Tony Indivino has been arrested. The FBI linked him to a kidnapping four years earlier. He abducted a four-year-old boy named Timmy DeMarzo, a Sleepless child whose normal parents had beaten him for disturbing them in the middle of the night nearly every night. Tony Indivino had hidden the kid with people who had taken much better care of him. But now he’s been caught and arraigned, and is being held without bail in the Conewango County jail.
There must be other ways beside the Subnet to find an underground genemod lab. But I don’t know what they are. I’ve done everything I can think of to do. But how can I give up the search for Precious’s killer? If I give up the search…
Outside the bus windows, the road climbs higher into the mountains. Already it’s June. The woods are in full leaf, although they’re not yet deep green but instead that tender yellow-green you see only a week or ten days every year. The sunny roadside bursts with daisies and butter-cups and Queen Anne’s lace. Creeks rush; streams burble.
If I lose my anger, there won’t be anything of me left.
For just a second I look into a black place so deep and cold that my breath freezes. Then it’s gone and the bus keeps on climbing the mountain road.
It lets me off in Kellsville and I walk the rest of the way up the mountain, which takes until sunset. Daddy’s yard looks just the same. Straggly grass, deep ruts, sagging porch. But it’s not Daddy sitting on the porch. It’s Donna.
“I thought you’d come here,” she says, not standing up. “Or did you go by my place first?”
“No.” In the shadows I can’t see her face.
“Did you go by the hospital to see how Jim’s doing?”
“No.”
“ ‘No.’ ’Course not. He don’t concern you, does he?”
I ignore this. “Where’s Daddy?”
“Asleep. No—passed out. Let’s be honest for once, okay, Carol Ann?”
But it was always Donna who wasn’t honest. Who insisted on being sunny in a world where the sun only really shines on the rich. I don’t say this.
She continues, “You’re the reason Jim got hurt, aren’t you? And the reason my place got trashed. You’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, and somebody important don’t like it.”
“It’s none of your business, Donna.”
“ ‘None of my business.’ ” She stands up then, in the porch shadows. “ ‘None of my business!’ Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me what’s my business and what isn’t? How much more family do you think I got to lose?”
This isn’t Donna. This is somebody else. I climb the porch steps and turn her face toward the sunset. She hasn’t been crying, but in the red light she starts to shake all over with a fury I never in a million years thought she was capable of.
“You stupid fuck—what do you think you’re doing? You got Jim hurt and you’re going to get yourself hurt next, or Daddy, or me! Whatever you’re doing, it isn’t going to bring Precious back, and it isn’t going to get even because there isn’t no ‘even.’ Don’t you even know that? You can’t beat those people; all you can do is try and stay away from them, and when you do brush up against them you get out quick and forget anything you learned or they’ll wreck whatever you got left of your life!”