Beaker's Dozen

  “Alice, we can’t even get her into the hospital without insurance information. Verifiable on-line.”

  “Listen,” Alice said, not to Leisha but over her shoulder, toward the back seat, “here’s what we’re going to do, Stella. I’m going to tell them you’re my daughter and you fell off a big rock you were climbing while we stopped for a snack at a roadside picnic area. We’re driving from California to Philadelphia to see your grandmother. Your name is Jordan Watrous and you’re five years old. Got that, honey?”

  “I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”

  “You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March 23. Can you do this, Stella?”

  “Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.

  Leisha stared at Alice. “Can you do this?”

  “Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”

  Alice half-carried, half-supported Stella into the emergency room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely around her face.

  Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower; often they uploaded from local precincts only once a day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half-century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital. Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.

  Leisha could.

  But the data file that would flash to rental agencies on Alice Camden Watrous might or might not include that she was Leisha Camden’s twin.

  Leisha looked at the rows of cars in the lot. A flashy luxury Chrysler, an Ikeda van, a row of middle-class Toyotas and Mercedes, a vintage ’99 Cadillac—she could imagine the owner’s face if that were missing—ten or twelve cheap runabouts, a hovercar with the uniformed driver asleep at the wheel. And a battered farm truck.

  Leisha walked over to the truck. A man sat at the wheel, smoking. She thought of her father.

  “Hello,” Leisha said.

  The man rolled down his window but didn’t answer. He had greasy brown hair.

  “See that hovercar over there?” Leisha said. She made her voice sound young, high. The man glanced at it indifferently; from this angle you couldn’t see that the driver was asleep. “That’s my bodyguard. He thinks I’m in the hospital, the way my father told me to, getting this lip looked at.” She could feel her mouth swollen from Alice’s blow.

  “So?”

  Leisha stamped her foot. “So I don’t want to be inside. He’s a shit and so’s Daddy. I want out. I’ll give you four thousand bank credits for your truck. Cash.”

  The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette, looked again at the hovercar. The driver’s shoulders were broad, and the car was within easy screaming distance.

  “All nice and legal,” Leisha said, and tried to smirk. Her knees felt watery.

  “Let me see the cash.”

  Leisha backed away from the truck, to where he could not reach her. She took the money from her arm clip. She was used to carrying a lot of cash; there had always been Bruce, or someone like Bruce. There had always been safety.

  “Get out of the truck on the other side,” Leisha said, “and lock the door behind you. Leave the keys on the seat, where I can see them from here. Then I’ll put the money on the roof where you can see it.”

  The man laughed, a sound like gravel pouring. “Regular little Dabney Engh, aren’t you? Is that what they teach you society debs at your fancy schools?”

  Leisha had no idea who Dabney Engh was. She waited, watching the man try to think of a way to cheat her, and tried to hide her contempt. She thought of Tony.

  “All right,” he said, and slid out of the truck.

  “Lock the door!”

  He grinned, opened the door again, locked it. Leisha put the money on the roof, yanked open the driver’s door, clambered in, locked the door, and powered up the window. The man laughed. She put the key into the ignition, started the truck, and drove toward the street. Her hands trembled.

  She drove slowly around the block twice. When she came back, the man was gone, and the driver of the hovercar was still asleep. She had wondered if the man would wake him, out of sheer malice, but he had not. She parked the truck and waited.

  An hour and a half later Alice and a nurse wheeled Stella out of the Emergency Entrance. Leisha leaped out of the truck and yelled, “Coming, Alice!” waving both her arms. It was too dark to see Alice’s expression; Leisha could only hope that Alice showed no dismay at the battered truck, that she had not told the nurse to expect a red car.

  Alice said, “This is Julie Bergadon, a friend that I called while you were setting Jordan’s arm.” The nurse nodded, uninterested. The two women helped Stella into the high truck cab; there was no back seat. Stella had a cast on her arm and looked drugged.

  “How?” Alice said as they drove off.

  Leisha didn’t answer. She was watching a police hovercar land at the other end of the parking lot. Two officers got out and strode purposefully towards Alice’s locked car under the skimpy maple.

  “My God,” Alice said. For the first time, she sounded frightened.

  “They won’t trace us,” Leisha said. “Not to this truck. Count on it.”

  “Leisha.” Alice’s voice spiked with fear. “Stella’s asleep.”

  Leisha glanced at the child, slumped against Alice’s shoulder. “No, she’s not. She’s unconscious from painkillers.”

  “Is that all right? Normal? For . . . her?”

  “We can black out. We can even experience substance-induced sleep.” Tony and she and Richard and Jeanine in the midnight woods . . . “Didn’t you know that, Alice?”

  “No.”

  “We don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

  They drove south in silence. Finally Alice said, “Where are we going to take her, Leisha?”

  “I don’t know. Any one of the Sleepless would be the first place the police would check—”

  “You can’t risk it. Not the way things are,” Alice said. She sounded weary. “But all my friends are in California. I don’t think we could drive this rust bucket that far before getting stopped.”

  “It wouldn’t make it anyway.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Let me think.”

  At an expressway exit stood a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data-shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.

  There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.

  Sanctuary. All of them going there or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like Stella, who could not.

  Where? With whom?

  Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too-visible stepmother, and was co-beneficiary of Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did? She stood a long time in the dark phone kiosk. Then she walked to the truck. Alice was asleep, her head thrown back against the seat. A tiny line of drool ran down her chin. Her face was white and drained in the bad light from the kiosk. Leisha walked back to the phone.

  “Stewart? Stewart Sutter?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Leisha Camden. Something has happened.” She told the story tersely, in bald sentences. Stewart did not interrupt.

  “Leisha—” Stewart said, and stopped.

  “I need help, Stewart.”

  “I’ll help you, Alice.??
?

  “I don’t need your help.” A wind whistled over the dark field beside the kiosk and Leisha shivered. She heard in the wind the thin keen of a beggar. In the wind, in her own voice.

  “All right,” Stewart said, “this is what we’ll do. I have a cousin in Ripley, New York, just over the state line from Pennsylvania on the route you’ll be driving east. It has to be in New York, I’m licensed in New York. Take the little girl there. I’ll call my cousin and tell her you’re coming. She’s an elderly woman, was quite an activist in her youth, her name is Janet Patterson. The town is—”

  “What makes you so sure she’ll get involved? She could go to jail. And so could you.”

  “She’s been in jail so many times you wouldn’t believe it. Political protests going all the way back to Vietnam. But no one’s going to jail. I’m now your attorney of record, I’m privileged. I’m going to get Stella declared a ward of the state. That shouldn’t be too hard with the hospital records you established in Skokie. Then she can be transferred to a foster home in New York, I know just the place, people who are fair and kind. Then Alice—”

  “She’s resident in Illinois. You can’t—”

  “Yes, I can. Since those research findings about the Sleepless life span have come out, legislators have been railroaded by stupid constituents scared or jealous or just plain angry. The result is a body of so-called ‘law’ riddled with contradictions, absurdities, and loopholes. None of it will stand in the long run—or at least I hope not—but in the meantime it can all be exploited. I can use it to create the most goddamn convoluted case for Stella that anybody ever saw, and in meantime she won’t be returned home. But that won’t work for Alice—she’ll need an attorney licensed in Illinois.”

  “We have one,” Leisha said. “Candace Holt.”

  “No, not a Sleepless. Trust me on this, Leisha. I’ll find somebody good. There’s a man in—are you crying?”

  “No,” Leisha said, crying.

  “Ah, God,” Stewart said. “Bastards. I’m sorry all this happened, Leisha.”

  “Don’t be,” Leisha said.

  When she had directions to Stewart’s cousin, she walked back to the truck. Alice was still asleep, Stella still unconscious. Leisha closed the truck door as quietly as possible. The engine balked and roared, but Alice didn’t wake. There was a crowd of people with them in the narrow and darkened cab: Stewart Sutter, Tony Indivino, Susan Melling, Kenzo Yagai, Roger Camden.

  To Stewart Sutter she said, You called to inform me about the situation at Morehouse, Kennedy. You are risking your career and your cousin for Stella. And you stand to gain nothing. Like Susan telling me in advance about Bernie Kuhn’s brain. Susan, who lost her life to Daddy’s dream and regained it by her own strength. A contract without consideration for each side is not a contract: Every first-year student knows that.

  To Kenzo Yagai she said, Trade isn’t always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown—it’s an ecology. An ecology of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they’re not contractually bound. Does a horse need a fish? Yes.

  To Tony she said, Yes, there are beggars in Spain who trade nothing, give nothing, do nothing. But there are more than beggars in Spain. Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the whole damn country. And you withdraw from the possibility of the ecology of help. That’s what Alice wanted, all those years ago in her bedroom. Pregnant, scared, angry, jealous, she wanted to help me, and I wouldn’t let her because I didn’t need it. But I do now. And she did then. Beggars need to help as well as be helped.

  And finally, there was only Daddy left. She could see him, bright-eyed, holding thick-leaved exotic flowers in his strong hands. To Camden she said, You were wrong. Alice is special. Oh, Daddy—the specialness of Alice! You were wrong.

  As soon as she thought this, lightness filled her. Not the buoyant bubble of joy, not the hard clarity of examination, but something else: sunshine, soft through the conservatory glass, where two children ran in and out. She suddenly felt light herself, not buoyant but translucent, a medium for the sunshine to pass clear through, on its way to somewhere else.

  She drove the sleeping woman and the wounded child through the night, east, toward the state line.

  FEIGENBAUM NUMBER

  “Feigenbaum Number” is that well-known SF phenomenon: the portmanteau story. A writer reads something by someone else: a story, or a scientific article, or maybe merely a reference to some event or phenomenon. Something happens in whatever deep part of the mind these things happen, and the new concept mates with another older, known concept to produce a hybrid offspring.

  One of the stimuli for “Feigenbaum Number” was a New Destinies essay by Charles Sheffield, “The Unlicked Bear Whelp.” This article dealt with chaos theory, but the part of it that sparked my imagination concerned iterated function theory. Being math-impaired, I had never heard of iterated function theory. Nor had I heard of its shimmering, suggestive components: strange attractors; convergence; the Feigenbaum number, at which predictable behavior changes to chaotic behavior. Metaphorically heady stuff for a lapsed English major.

  The other concept packed into this portmanteau, the Platonic idea that there exists an ideal state of which reality is merely a poor reflection, I had known about for a long time. I used it in an early story, “Shadows on the Cave Wall” (in Universe 11, 1981). Now it cross-fertilized with iterated function theory to produce the question: What if the Platonic state were subject to the law of convergence? And someone was fated to experience that?

  Fifteen years later, I saw Tom Stoppard’s marvelous play Arcadia, which mates iterated function theory with the collapse of artistic romanticism. Stoppard’s Thomasina Coverly is a far more enchanting creature than my Jack. She also lives in a far more enchanting world—which makes you wonder which way the convergence is actually going.

  “Behold! Human beings living in an underground den . . .

  Like ourselves, they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite walls of the cave. ”

  —Plato, The Republic

  I ROSE FROM THE BED, LEAVING DIANE SPRAWLED ACROSS THE RUMPLED sheets, smiling, lipstick smeared and large belly sweaty.

  She said, “Wow.”

  “Wow yourself,” I said and turned to the mirror. Behind me, the other woman rose ghostly from the bed and crossed, smiling, to the window.

  Diane said, “Come back to bed, Jack.”

  “Can’t. I have to go. Student appointment.”

  “So what’s new?”

  In the mirror I saw her eyes narrow, her mouth tighten. The other woman turned from the window, laughing, one slim graceful arm pushing back a tendril of chestnut hair.

  Diane skinned her brown hair back from her face. “Is it too much to ask, Jack, honey, that just once after we make love you don’t go rushing off like there’s a three-alarm fire? Just once?’

  I didn’t answer.

  “I mean, how do you think that makes me feel? Slambam-thank-you, ma’am. We have an actual relationship here, we’ve been going out for three months, it doesn’t seem a lot to ask that after we make love you don’t just—”

  I didn’t interrupt. I couldn’t. The dizziness was strong this time; soon the nausea would follow. Sex did that. The intensity. Diane ranted, jerking herself to a kneeling position on the bed, framed by lumpy maroon window curtains opened a crack to a neighbor’s peeling frame house and weedy garden. Across the room the other Diane stood framed by crimson silk draperies opened a crack to a mellowed-wood cottage riotous with climbing roses. She blew me a light-hearted kiss. Her eyes glowed with understanding.

  The nausea came.

  “—can’t seem to understand how it makes me feel to be treated like “

  I clutched the edge of the dresser, which was both a scratched pressed-board “reproducti
on” and a polished cherrywood lowboy. Two perfume bottles floated in front of me: yellow plastic spraybottle and clean-lined blown glass. I squeezed my eyes shut. The ghostly Diane disappeared in the act of sauntering, slim and assured, toward the bathroom.

  “—don’t even really look at me, not when we make love or—”

  Eyes shut, I groped for the bedroom door.

  “Jack!”

  I slammed the doors, both of them, and left the apartment before Diane could follow. With her sloppy anger, her overweight nakedness, her completely justified weeping.

  Outside was better. I drove my Escort to campus. The other car, the perfectly engineered driving machine with the sleek and balanced lines, shimmered in and out around me, but the vertigo didn’t return. I’d never gotten very intense about cars, and over the years I’d learned to handle the double state of anything that wasn’t too intense. The rest I avoided. Mostly.

  The Aaron Fielding Faculty Office Building jutted boxlike three stories from the asphalt parking lot, and it blended its three floors harmoniously with a low hillside whose wooded lines were repeated in horizontal stretches of brick and wood. The poster-cluttered lobby was full of hurried students trying to see harried advisers, and it was a marble atrium where scholars talked eagerly about the mind of man. I walked down the corridor toward my cubicle, one of a row allotted to teaching assistants and post-docs.

  But Dr. Frances Schraeder’s door was open, and I couldn’t resist.

  She sat at her terminal, working, and when I knocked on the doorjamb (scarred metal, ghostly graceful molding), she looked up and smiled. “Jack! Come look at this!”

  I came in, with so much relief my eyes prickled. The material Fran’s long, age-spotted fingers were held poised over her keyboard, and the ideal Fran’s long, age-spotted fingers echoed them. The ideal Fran’s white hair was fuller, but no whiter, and both were cut in simple short caps. The material Fran wore glasses, but both Frans’ bright blue eyes, a little sunken, shone with the same alert tranquility.