Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online Page B

the water out of her eyes, Tony was gone.
     
    Midnight. “Okay,” Carol said. “Who’s first?”
    The six teenagers in the brambly clearing looked at each other. A Y-lamp, kept on low for atmosphere, cast weird shadows across their faces and over their bare legs. Around the clearing Roger Camden’s trees stood thick and dark, a wall between them and the closest of the estate’s outbuildings. It was very hot. August air hung heavy, sullen. They had voted against bringing an air-conditioned Y-field because this was a return to the primitive, the dangerous; let it be primitive.
    Six pairs of eyes stared at the glass in Carol’s hand.
    “Come on, ” she said. “Who wants to drink up?” Her voice was jaunty, theatrically hard. “It was difficult enough to get this.”
    “How did you get it?” said Richard, the group member—except for Tony—with the least influential family contacts, the least money. “In a drinkable form like that?”
    “Jennifer got it,” Carol said, and five sets of eyes shifted to Jennifer Sharifi, who two weeks into her visit with Carol’s family was confusing them all. She was the American-born daughter of a Hollywood movie star and an Arab prince who had wanted to found a Sleepless dynasty. The movie star was an aging drug addict; the prince, who had taken his fortune out of oil and put it into Y-energy when Kenzo Yagai was still licensing his first patents, was dead. Jennifer Sharifi was richer than Leisha would someday be, and infinitely more sophisticated about procuring things. The glass held interleukin-1, an immune-system booster, one of many substances which as a side effect induced the brain to swift and deep sleep.
    Leisha stared at the glass. A warm feeling crept through her lower belly, not unlike the feeling when she and Richard made love. She caught Jennifer watching her, and flushed.
    Jennifer disturbed her. Not for the obvious reasons she disturbed Tony and Richard and Jack: the long black hair, the tall, slim body in shorts and halter. Jennifer didn’t laugh. Leisha had never met a Sleepless who didn’t laugh, nor one who said so little, with such deliberate casualness. Leisha found herself speculating on what Jennifer Sharifi wasn’t saying. It was an odd sensation to feel toward another Sleepless.
    Tony said to Carol, “Give it to me!”
    Carol handed him the glass. “Remember, you only need a little sip.”
    Tony raised the glass to his mouth, stopped, and looked at them over the rim from his fierce eyes. He drank.
    Carol took back the glass. They all watched Tony. Within a minute he lay on the rough ground; within two, his eyes closed in sleep.
    It wasn’t like seeing parents sleep, siblings, friends. It was Tony. They looked away, avoided each other’s eyes. Leisha felt the warmthbetween her legs tug and tingle, faintly obscene. She didn’t look at Jennifer.
    When it was Leisha’s turn, she drank slowly, then passed the glass to Richard. Her head turned heavy, as if it were being stuffed with damp rags. The trees at the edge of the clearing blurred. The portable lamp blurred, too. It wasn’t bright and clean anymore but squishy, blobby; if she touched it, it would smear. Then darkness swooped over her brain, taking it away: taking away her mind . “Daddy!” She tried to call, to clutch for him, but then the darkness obliterated her.
    Afterward, they all had headaches. Dragging themselves back through the woods in the thin morning light was torture, compounded by an odd shame. They didn’t touch each other. Leisha walked as far away from Richard as she could.
    Jennifer was the only one who spoke. “So now we know,” she said, and her voice held a strange satisfaction.
    It was a whole day before the throbbing left the base of Leisha’s skull, or the nausea her stomach. She sat alone in her room, waiting for the misery to pass, and despite the heat, her whole body shivered.
    There had not even been any dreams.
     
    “I want you to come with me