“Donna, you don’t know—”
“No, it’s you who don’t know! You don’t know nothing about how the world works! You’re supposed to be the smart one, and I’m supposed to be dumb as a bucket of hair, poor old dumb Donna, but I know you can’t fight them and win. You can only lose more’n you already did and I’m not going to do that—I’m not going to lose everything else I got left. And you’re not going to lose it for me neither, Carol Ann. Promise me right here and now, on Precious’s grave, that you’ll leave this alone.”
“I can’t.”
“Promise me.”
“I said I can’t!”
We stare at each other in the dying light, and I see that we’re never going to agree, never going to understand each other. We’re made too different. She lives in a world where when you get slammed hard, you pick yourself up and go on. I don’t live in that world. I don’t want to. That’s what makes all the difference.
But it’s her that crumbles first. “All right, Carol,” she says wearily, not meaning it. “All right.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, not meaning it either.
We don’t say anything more. The sun goes down, and somewhere down the mountain, a dog barks.
I move back to the city, and go back to work at my old housecleaning company. Whenever I can I sign up for double shifts, houses in the day and offices at night. It makes me tired enough to sleep. Donna visits me once. I cook her dinner, we go to a vid, she takes the gravtrain back the next day. The whole time, she chats and laughs and hugs me. The guy in the apartment next door watches her like she’s a vid star.
I’m hanging on. Trying not to think. Not to feel. Waiting, although I don’t know for what. The days are frozen and the nights dreamless.
It’s not that way for the rest of the country. Every day something else happens. A Sleepless teenager dies in a car crash in Seattle, and doctors take apart his body and brain. They find that every bit of tissue is perfect. Not just in good shape—he’s only seventeen—but perfect. Sleepless tissue regenerates. The Sleepless won’t age. An unexpected side effect, the scientists say.
A county in New York says Sleepless can’t serve on juries because they aren’t “peers” of everybody else.
A scientist in Illinois publishes a study on sparrows made to be sleepless. Their metabolism is so high they can’t eat enough to keep themselves alive. They die, eating and eating, of starvation.
Pollux, Pennsylvania, votes a law that Sleepless can be refused apartment rentals. They’re awake too much, which would run up landlords’ utility bills.
Some institute in Boston proves that sleepless mice are unable to contract or carry hantoviruses.
A vid preacher declares Jennifer Sharifi the Antichrist, sent to Earth to represent ultimate evil just before the final Armageddon.
The New York Times prints an editorial that says, essentially, that everybody should take a deep breath and calm down about sleeplessness.
And in July, the inmates of the Conewango County Jail kill Tony Indivino in the recreation yard. They beat him to death with a lead pipe.
I learn this on the eleven o’clock news, drinking a beer and cleaning my own apartment. The terminal is a cheap standard wallscreen, rimmed in black plastic. The news has no pictures of the death.
“…promised a full investigation of the incident, which occurred at twelve-twenty this afternoon Eastern Standard Time. The inspector general of the New York State Correctional System—”
If they knew the exact time the “incident” was occurring, why didn’t somebody stop it?
I stand there, staring at the screen, a glass of beer in one hand and a cleaning rag in the other. The red message light on the side of the terminal blinks. These cheap systems can’t split the screen. I choose the message, and the Sanctuary logo fills the black rim.
“Message for Carol A. Benson,” says a pleasant computer voice, “from Jennifer Sharifi of Sanctuary, Incorporated, New York State. This message is shielded to Class One-A. It will not record on any system and will repeat only once. The message is: Arrowgene operating as Mountview Bionetics, Sarahela, Pennsylvania. Chief scientist is Dr. Tyler Robert Wells, 419 Harpercrest Lane. End message.”
The screen blanks.
If Tony Indivino were here, he would tell you that Sanctuary is about survival. Not revenge.
Not anymore.
I fiddle with the terminal for half an hour, but the computer voice was accurate. The message hasn’t been recorded. There’s no trace of it anywhere, in my system or in the retrievables off the parent system. I’m the only one who will ever hear it.
Daddy’s gun is where I left it, and in the same condition. So is he.
“Hey, Daddy.”
It takes him a minute to focus. “Carol Ann.”
“It’s me.”
“Welcome home.” Suddenly he smiles, and I see a flash of what he was, the old cheerful sweetness, before it sinks under the heavy smell of whiskey. “You here? Long?”
“No,” I say. “Just overnight.”
“Well, ’night. Sleep tight.” It’s seven o’clock in the evening.
“Sure, Daddy. You, too.”
“Gonna sit up. Little longer.”
“You do that.”
The next morning, I’m gone by five. The gun comes apart, and it’s in my duffel bag. I wear jeans and good shoes. By seven I’m in Kellsville. The bus south leaves at eight. I drink a cup of coffee and watch the headlines circle the news kiosk.
NO SUSPECTS IDENTIFIED IN INDIVINO MURDER
“NO ONE IS TALKING,” SAYS CONEWANGO WARDEN (STORY 1—click here)
FBI RECEIVES ANON CALL TO BOMB SANCTUARY (STORY 2)
INDIVINO DEATH CALLED NATIONAL DISGRACE (STORY 3)
RAIN PUMMELS SOUTHEAST (STORY 4)
FRANCE CALLS FOR MAJOR EUROCREDIT REFORM (STORY 5)
SCIENTISTS CREATE GENEMOD ALGAE. POTENTIAL FOR FEEDING THE WORLD IS ENORMOUS, SAYS NOBELIST (STORY 6)
I put in a credit chip and press button six. The flimsy prints out, but there’s not time to read it before my bus leaves. I shove the flimsy in my duffel and sleep all the way to Sarahela, Pennsylvania.
Four-nineteen Harpercrest Lane is in a shielded community. From beyond the gate I can see streets running down to a river park. The houses are tall, narrow, and stuck together in fours and fives. There are trees, small playgrounds, beds of perfect genemod flowers. The river, which I don’t know the name of, sparkles blue.
It’s the kind of community that cooperates, that relies on word of mouth. A single day of loitering outside the gate gives me the name of the most commonly used residential cleaning company: Silver’s Polish. The next day I’m hired. They’re glad to have such an experienced cleaning tech.
The Dr. Tyler Wellses have a tech come every Thursday. On my second week I trade shifts with another worker, two for one, telling him I need Wednesday off to see a doctor. By eight o’clock I’m in the house. I set the vacuuming bot to snuffling around the kitchen floor and spray the sink with organic-molecule-eating foam. Four littered places on the breakfast table. I go through the rest of the house.
Two kids’ rooms, toys and small clothing. They’ve already left for school.
A woman singing in the master-bedroom shower.
Nobody else is home. I go back down the stairs. Halfway down, on a landing with a sculpture of a Greek wrestler below a cool blue-tinted window, I see him come out of a backyard shed, carrying a trowel and wearing gloves. Short, skinny, slightly balding. Dr. Tyler Robert Wells, scientist, gardens by hand, without bots.
I slip the gun from my cleaning kit, push the parts together, and raise it to the window. Once he’s in the crosshair, I tell the chip to take over, keeping centered on his head. It’s in his head, the knowledge that genemods animals to kill other people’s children. I sit the gun on the wide polished windowsill, where it follows Wells’s every move on its all-directional swivel. I programmed it to my voice, within a five-foot radius. All I have to do is say “Fire.”