Beggars in Spain (10 page)

J
ordan Watrous stood just outside the front gate of the We-Sleep scooter factory, facing the dusty Mississippi road. Electrified fence eight feet high stretched away on either side. Not a Y-energy field, not sophisticated technology, but it would do. For now, anyway, while attacks on the factory were minor, unorganized, and verbal. Later on, they would need a Y-field. Hawke said so.

Across the river, in Arkansas, the Y-energy cones of the Samsung-Chrysler plant glinted in the early morning sun.

Jordan squinted down the road. Sweat matted his hair and trickled down his neck. The guard, a stringy, tow-headed woman in faded jeans, stuck her head out of her kiosk and called, “Hot enough for you, Jordan?”

Over his shoulder he said, “Always is, Mayleen.”

She laughed. “You California boys just wilt up in God’s natural heat.”

“I guess we’re not as tough as you river rats.”

“Boy, ain’t
nobody
as tough as us. You just look at Mr. Hawke.”

As if were possible for anyone at a We-Sleep factory to do otherwise! Not that Hawke hadn’t earned the reverence in Mayleen’s voice. When Mayleen had been hired last winter, Jordan, only four weeks into his own job as Hawke’s personal assistant, had gone with Hawke to her shack for the interview. Although adequately heated and provisioned
through the cheap Y-energy that was every citizen’s right under the Dole, the shack had no indoor plumbing, little furniture, and few toys for the skinny tow-headed kids that had stared at Jordan’s leather jacket and lapel comlink. Last week, Mayleen had announced with pride that she’d just bought a toilet and a lace pillow set. The pride, Jordan now knew, was as practical as the toilet. He knew because Calvin Hawke had taught him.

Jordan returned to studying the road. Mayleen said, “Expecting someone?”

Slowly Jordan turned around. “Didn’t Hawke call it in?”

“Call what in? He didn’t tell me nothing.”

“Jesus
Christ,
” Jordan said. The terminal in the kiosk shrilled and Mayleen pulled her head back in. Jordan watched her through the plastiglass. As she listened, her face hardened as only these Mississippi faces could. Instantaneous ice in the steaming heat. He had never seen that in California.

Obviously, Hawke was telling her not only to admit a visitor, but who the visitor was.

“Yes, sir,” she mouthed at the terminal, and Jordan winced. Nobody at the plant called Hawke “sir” unless they were furious. And nobody got furious at Hawke. They displaced it. Always.

Mayleen stepped away from her kiosk. “This your doing, Jordan?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” She spat the word, and Jordan finally,
finally
—Hawke said it always took him too long to get angry—felt his own face harden.

“Is that your business, Mayleen?”

“Anything goes on in this here plant’s my business,” Mayleen said, which was only the truth. Hawke had made it the truth, for all 800 employees. “We don’t want her kind here.”

“Hawke apparently does.”

“I asked you why.”

“Why don’t you ask
him
why?”

“I’m asking
you
. Why, dammit?”

Along the road, a dust cloud advanced. A groundcar. Jordan felt a sudden stab of dread: had anyone told her not to come in a Samsung-Chrysler? But she could be trusted to already know something like that. She always did.

Mayleen snarled, “I done asked you a question, Jordan! What’s Mr. Hawke doing letting one of
them
in our plant?”

“You made a demand, not asked a question.” The anger felt good now, sweeping away his nervousness. “But I’ll answer it anyway, Mayleen. Just for you. Leisha Camden is here because she asked to come and Hawke gave her permission.”

“I can see that! What I can’t see is why!”

The car pulled up at the gate. It was heavily armored, and packed with bodyguards. The driver got out to open the doors. The car was not a Samsung-Chrysler.

“Why?” Mayleen repeated, with such hatred that even Jordan was startled. He turned. Her thin mouth twisted in a snarl, but in her eyes was a fear that Jordan recognized—Hawke had taught him to recognize it—a fear not of bone-and-blood people but of the degrading choices those people had indirectly caused: two dollars for a half pack of cigarettes, or two dollars for a pair of warm socks? Extra milk for the kids above the Dole allotment, or a haircut? The fear was not of starving, not in a country of prosperity built on cheap energy, but of being shut out from that prosperity. Second class. Not good enough for that basic badge of adult dignity, work. A parasite. The anger oozed out of Jordan; sadly he felt it go. Anger was so much easier.

As gently as he could, he said to Mayleen, “Leisha Camden’s here because she’s my mother’s sister. My aunt.”

He wondered how long it would take Hawke this time to redeem him.

“And each scooter takes sixteen assembly-line operations?” Leisha asked.

“Yes,” Jordan said. They stood with Leisha’s bodyguards, everybody in hard hats and goggles, watching Station 8-E. Two dozen scooters were
swarmed over by three workers, who in their zeal completely ignored the visitors. The zeal was more notable than the results. But of course Leisha would already know that.

Six months ago, at his little sister’s eighteenth birthday party in California, Leisha had questioned Jordan about the factory so closely that he had known, like cold water around his bones, that eventually she would ask to visit. What he hadn’t expected was that Hawke would let her.

She said, “I thought Mr. Hawke might join us. I came to meet him, after all.”

“He said to bring you to the office after the tour.”

Beneath the heavy safety glasses, Leisha’s mouth smiled. “Showing me my place?”

“I guess so,” Jordan said heavily. He hated it when Hawke, always unpredictable, descended to playing one-upmanship.

To Jordan’s surprise, Leisha laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t mind on my behalf, Jordan. It’s not as if he’s not entitled.”

And what could Jordan say to that? Entitlement, after all, was the entire issue. Who got what, and how, and why.

Somehow Jordan didn’t feel like the proper person to comment on that. He wasn’t even certain who within his own family was entitled to what, or why.

His mother and his aunt had such a strange relationship. Or maybe “strained” was a better word. And yet it wasn’t. Leisha visited the Watrous family in California only on ceremonial occasions; Alice never visited Leisha in Chicago at all. Yet Alice, who loved gardening, had a fresh bouquet from her garden flown to Leisha’s apartment every single day, at a cost Jordan considered insane. And the flowers were ordinary, hardy garden blooms: phlox and sunflowers and day lilies and lemon-drop marigolds, which Leisha could have bought on the streets of Chicago for a few dollars. “Doesn’t Aunt Leisha prefer those indoor exotics?” Jordan asked once. “Yes,” his mother said, smiling.

Leisha always brought Jordan and his sister Moira wonderful presents: junior electronics kits, telescopes, two shares of a stock to follow
on the datanets. Alice always seemed as pleased by the gifts as the kids were. Yet when Leisha showed Jordan and Moira how to use each one—how to adjust the telescope to azimuth and altitude, how to do Japanese calligraphy on rice paper—Alice always left the room. After the first few years, Jordan sometimes wished Leisha would leave, too, and let him and Moira just read the instructions themselves. Leisha explained too fast, and too hard, and too long, and got upset that Jordan and Moira didn’t remember everything the first time. It didn’t even help that Aunt Leisha’s upset seemed to be with herself, not with them. It made Jordan feel stupid. “Leisha has her own ways,” was all that Alice would say. “And we have ours.”

Strangest of all was Alice’s Twin Group. Leisha had looked first shocked, then sad, then angry when she heard about the Twin Group. Alice volunteered there three days a week. The Group kept datafiles about twins who could communicate with each other across vast distances, who knew what each other was thinking, who felt pain when the other was in trouble. They also studied pairs of twins in preschool to see how they learned to differentiate themselves as separate people. This jumble of ESP, parapsychology, and scientific method bewildered Jordan, then seventeen. “Aunt Leisha says the statistics of coincidence can account for most of your ‘ESP.’ And I thought you and her weren’t even monozygotic twins!” “We’re not,” Alice said.

In the last two years Jordan had seen a lot of his aunt, without telling his mother. Leisha was a Sleepless, the economic enemy. She was also fair, generous, and idealistic. It troubled him.

So many things troubled him.

Touring the plant took over an hour. Jordan tried to see the place through Leisha’s eyes: people instead of cost-efficient robots, shouted arguments on the line, rock music blaring. Rejected parts from Receiving Inspection half-repacked in dirty cartons. Somebody’s gnawed-on sandwich kicked into a corner.

When Jordan finally led Leisha into Hawke’s office, Hawke rose from behind his massive, rough-hewn desk of Georgia pine. “Ms. Camden. An honor.”

“Mr. Hawke.”

She held out her hand. Hawke took it, and Jordan watched her slight recoil. People meeting Calvin Hawke for the first time usually recoiled; not until that second had Jordan realized how intently he’d wondered if Leisha would. It wasn’t Hawke’s huge size as much as his disconcerting physical sharpness: beaked nose, cheekbones like chisels, piercing black eyes, even the necklace of sharpened wolf ’s teeth which had belonged to his great-great-great-grandfather, a mountain man who had married three Indian women and killed three hundred braves. Or so Hawke said. Would wolf’s teeth nearly two hundred years old, Jordan wondered, still be so sharp?

Hawke’s would.

Leisha smiled up at Hawke, nearly a foot taller despite her own height, and said, “Thank you for letting me come.” When Hawke said nothing, she added directly, “Why did you?”

He pretended she’d asked a different question. “You’re safe enough here. Even without your goons. There is no baseless hatred in my plants.”

Jordan thought of Mayleen, but said nothing. You didn’t contradict Hawke in public.

Leisha said coolly, “An interesting use of ‘baseless,’ Mr. Hawke. In the law we call a usage like that insinuating. But now that I
am
here, I’d like to ask some questions, if I may.”

“Of course,” Hawke said. He folded his enormous arms across his chest and leaned back against his desk, apparently all agreeable helpfulness. On the desk sat a comlink, a coffee mug with the Harvard logo, and a Cherokee ceremonial doll. None of them had been there this morning. Hawke, Jordan saw, had been assembling his stage set. The back of Jordan’s neck prickled.

Leisha said, “Your scooters are stripped-down models, with the simplest possible Y-cones and fewer options than any other model on the market.”

“That’s right,” Hawke said pleasantly.

“And their reliability is less than any other model. They need more
replacement parts, sooner. In fact, nothing but the Y-cone deflector shield carries any kind of warranty, and of course the deflectors are under patent and aren’t subcontracted here.”

“You’ve done your homework,” Hawke said.

“The scooters can reach a maximum of only thirty miles per hour.”

“True.”

“They sell for 10 percent more than a comparable Schwinn or Ford or Sony.”

“Also true.”

“Yet you’ve captured 32 percent of the domestic market, you’ve opened three new plants in the last year, and you’ve filed a corporate return on assets of 28 percent when the industry average is barely 11 percent.”

Hawke smiled.

Leisha took a step toward him. She said intently, “Don’t go on doing it, Mr. Hawke. It’s a terrible mistake. Not for us—for
you
.”

Hawke said genially, “Are you threatening my plant, Ms. Camden?”

Jordan’s stomach tightened. Hawke was deliberately misinterpreting what Leisha had said, turning it from a plea into a threat so he could have a fight instead of a discussion. So this was why he’d let her visit a We-Sleep plant: he wanted the cheap thrill of a face-to-face confrontation. The dirt-poor leader of a national political movement going to the mat with the big-time Sleepless lawyer. Disappointment swept through Jordan; Hawke was bigger than that.

He needed Hawke to be bigger than that.

Leisha said, “Of course I’m not threatening you, Mr. Hawke, and you know it. I’m merely trying to point out that your We-Sleep Movement is dangerous to the country, and to yourselves. Don’t be so hypocritical as to pretend not to understand.”

Hawke went on smiling genially, but Jordan saw a tiny muscle in his neck, just above a yellowed wolf tooth, begin to beat rhythmically.

“I could hardly help understand, Ms. Camden. You’ve hammered on this one stone in the press for years now.”

“And I’ll go on hammering. Whatever drives Sleepers and Sleepless
farther apart is ultimately no good for either of us. You have people buying your scooters not because they’re good, not because they’re cheap, not because they’re beautiful, but solely because they’re made by Sleepers, with profits going only to Sleepers. You—and all your followers in other industries—are splitting the country in two economically, Mr. Hawke, creating a dual economy based on hate. That’s dangerous for everyone!”

“But especially for the economic interests of Sleepless?” Hawke asked, apparently all disinterested interest. Jordan saw that he thought he’d gained ground by Leisha’s sudden emotion.

“No,” Leisha said wearily. “Come on, Mr. Hawke, you know better. Sleepless economic interests are based in the global economy, especially in finance and high-tech skills. You could manufacture every vehicle, building, and widget in America and not touch them.”

Them,
Jordan thought. Not
us
. He tried to see if Hawke had noticed.

Hawke said silkily, “Then why are you here, Ms. Camden?”

“For the same reason I go to Sanctuary. To rail against stupidity.”

The tiny muscle in Hawke’s neck beat faster; Jordan saw that he hadn’t expected Leisha to bracket him with Sanctuary, the enemy. Hawke reached across his desk and pressed a buzzer. Leisha’s bodyguards tensed. Hawke tossed them a look of contempt: traitors to their own biological side. The office door opened and a young black woman entered, looking puzzled.