Beggars in Spain

Alice was in Pe

It was an isolated hamlet, twenty-five miles from the nearest hospital. Alice lived with a man named Ed, a silent carpenter twenty years older than she, in a cabin in the woods. The cabin had water and electricity but no newsnet. In the early spring light the earth was raw and bare, slashed with icy gullies. Alice and Ed apparently worked at nothing. Alice was eight months pregnant.

“I didn’t want you here,” she said to Leisha. “So why are you?”

“Because you’re my sister.”

“God, look at you. Is that what they’re wearing at Harvard? Boots like that? When did you become fashionable, Leisha? You were always too busy being intellectual to care.”

“What’s this all about, Alice? Why here? What are you doing?”

“Living,” Alice said. “Away from dear Daddy, away from Chicago, away from drunken, broken Susan — did you know she drinks? Just like Mom. He does that to people. But not to me. I got out. I wonder if you ever will.”

“Got out? To this?”

“I’m happy,” Alice said angrily. “Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about? Isn’t that the aim of your great Kenzo Yagai — happiness through individual effort?”

Leisha thought of saying that Alice was making no efforts that she could see. She didn’t say it. A chicken ran through the yard of the cabin. Behind, the mountains rose in layer upon layer of blue haze. Leisha thought what this place must have been like in winter cut off from the world where people strived toward goals, learned, changed.

“I’m glad you’re happy, Alice.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m glad, too,” Alice said, almost defiantly. The next moment she abruptly hugged Leisha, fiercely, the huge, hard mound of her belly crushed between them. Alice’s hair smelled sweet, like fresh grass in sunlight.

“I’ll come see you again, Alice.”

“Don’t,” Alice said.

SIX

SLEEPLESS MUTIE BEGS for reversal of gene tampering,” screamed the headline in the Food Mart. “’Please Let Me Sleep Like Real People!’ Child Pleads.”

Leisha typed in her credit number and pressed the news kiosk for a printout, although ordinarily she ignored the electronic tabloids. The headline went on circling the kiosk. A Food Mart employee stopped stacking boxes on shelves and watched her. Bruce, Leisha’s bodyguard, watched the employee.

She was twenty-two, in her final year at Harvard Law, editor of the Law Review, clearly first in her graduating class. The closest three contenders were Jonathan Cocchiara, Len Carter, and Martha Wentz. All Sleepless.

In her apartment she skimmed the printout. Then she accessed the Groupnet run from Austin. The files had more news stories about the child, with comments from other Sleepless, but before she could call them up Kevin Baker came online himself, on voice.

“Leisha. I’m glad you called. I was going to call you.”

“What’s the situation with this Stella Bevington, Kev? Has anybody checked it out?”

“Randy Davies. He’s from Chicago but I don’t think you’ve met him; he’s still in high school. He’s in Park Ridge, Stella’s in Skokie. Her parents wouldn’t talk to him — they were pretty abusive, in fact — but he got to see Stella face-to-face anyway. It doesn’t look like an abuse case, just the usual stupidity: parents wanted a genius child, scrimped and saved, and now they can’t handle that she is one. They scream at her to sleep, get emotionally abusive when she contradicts them, but so far no violence.”

“Is the emotional abuse actionable?”

“I don’t think we want to move on it yet. Two of us will keep in close touch with Stella — she does have a modem, and she hasn’t told her parents about the net — and Randy will drive out weekly.”

Leisha bit her lip. “A tabloid shitpiece said she’s seven years old.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t be left there. I’m an Illinois resident, I can file an abuse grievance from here if Candy’s got too much in her briefcase… Seven years old.

“No. Let it sit a while. Stella will probably be all right. You know that.”

She did. Nearly all of the Sleepless stayed all right, no matter how much opposition came from the stupid segment of society. And it was only the stupid segment, Leisha argued, a small if vocal minority. Most people could, and would, adjust to the growing presence of the Sleepless, when it became clear that that presence included not only growing power but growing benefits to the country as a whole.

Kevin Baker, now twenty-six, had made a fortune in microchips so revolutionary that Artificial Intelligence, once a debated dream, was yearly closer to reality. Carolyn Rizzolo had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her play Morning Light. She was twenty-four. Jeremy Robinson had done significant work in superconductivity applications while still a graduate student at Stanford. William Thaine, Law Review editor when Leisha first came to Harvard, was now in private practice. He had never lost a case. He was twenty-six, and the cases were becoming important. His clients valued his ability more than his age.

But not everyone reacted that way.

Kevin Baker and Richard Keller had started the datanet that bound the Sleepless into a tight group, constantly aware of each other’s personal fights. Leisha Camden financed the legal battles, the educational costs of Sleepless whose parents were unable to meet them the support of children in emotionally bad situations. Rhonda Lavelier got herself licensed as a foster mother in California, and whenever possible the Group maneuvered to have young Sleepless who were removed from their homes assigned to Rhonda. The Group now had three licensed lawyers; within the next year it would gain four more, licensed to practice in five different states.

The one time they had not been able to remove an abused Sleepless child legally, they kidnapped him.

Timmy DeMarzo, four years old. Leisha had been opposed to the action. She had argued the case morally and pragmatically — to her they were the same thing — thus: If they believed in their society, in its fundamental laws and in their ability to belong to it as free-trading productive individuals, they must remain bound by the society’s contractual laws. The Sleepless were, for the most part, Yagaiists. They should already know this. And if the FBI caught them, the courts and press would crucify them.

They were not caught.

Timmy DeMarzo — not even old enough to call for help on the datanet, they had learned of the situation through the automatic police record scan Kevin maintained through his company — was stolen from his own back yard in Wichita. He had lived the last year in an isolated trailer in North Dakota; no place was too isolated for a modem. He was cared for by a legally irreproachable foster mother who had lived there all her life. The foster mother was second cousin to a Sleepless, a broad cheerful woman with a much better brain than her appearance indicated. She was a Yagaiist. No record of the child’s existence appeared in any data bank: not the IRS’s, not any school’s, not even the local grocery store’s computerized checkout slips. Food specifically for the child was shipped in monthly on a truck owned by a Sleepless in State College, Pe

The kidnapping had been arranged by Tony Indivino.

“It’s Tony I wanted to talk to you about,” Kevin said to Leisha. “He’s started again. This time he means it. He’s buying land.”