Free Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress Page B

whipping down the Charles River, Richard Keller came to Cambridge. Leisha had not seen him for three years. He didn’t send her word on the Groupnet that he was coming. She hurried up the walk to her townhouse, muffled to the eyes in a red wool scarf against the snowy cold, and he stood there blocking the doorway. Behind Leisha, her bodyguard tensed.
    “Richard! Bruce, it’s all right, this is an old friend.”
    “Hello, Leisha.”
    He was heavier, sturdier-looking, with a breadth of shoulder she didn’t recognize. But the face was Richard’s, older but unchanged: dark low brows, unruly dark hair. He had grown a beard.
    “You look beautiful,” he said.
    Inside, she handed him a cup of coffee. “Are you here on business?” From the Groupnet she knew that he had finished his master’s and had done outstanding work in marine biology in the Caribbean but had left that a year ago and disappeared from the net.
    “No. Pleasure.” He smiled suddenly, the old smile that opened up his dark face. “I almost forgot about that for a long time. Contentment,yes. We’re all good at the contentment that comes from sustained work. But pleasure? Whim? Caprice? When was the last time you did something silly, Leisha?”
    She smiled. “I ate cotton candy in the shower.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “To see if it would dissolve in gooey pink patterns.”
    “Did it?”
    “Yes. Lovely ones.”
    “And that was your last silly thing? When was it?”
    “Last summer,” Leisha said, and laughed.
    “Well, mine is sooner than that. It’s now. I’m in Boston for no other reason than the spontaneous pleasure of seeing you.”
    Leisha stopped laughing. “That’s an intense tone for a spontaneous pleasure, Richard.”
    “Yup,” he said, intensely. She laughed again. He didn’t.
    “I’ve been in India, Leisha. And China and Africa. Thinking, mostly. Watching. First I traveled like a Sleeper, attracting no attention. Then I set out to meet the Sleepless in India and China. There are a few, you know, whose parents were willing to come here for the operation. They pretty much are accepted and left alone. I tried to figure out why desperately poor countries—by our standards anyway; over there Y-energy is mostly available only in big cities—don’t have any trouble accepting the superiority of Sleepless, whereas Americans, with more prosperity than any time in history, build in resentment more and more.”
    Leisha said, “Did you figure it out?”
    “No. But I figured out something else, watching all those communes and villages and kampongs . We are too individualistic.”
    Disappointment swept Leisha. She saw her father’s face: Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort. …She reached for Richard’s cup. “More coffee?”
    He caught her wrist and looked up into her face. “Don’t misunderstand me, Leisha. I’m not talking about work. We are too much individuals in the rest of our lives. Too emotionally rational. Too much alone. Isolation kills more than the free flow of ideas. It kills joy.”
    He didn’t let go of her wrist. She looked down into his eyes, into depths she hadn’t seen before. It was the feeling of looking into a mine shaft, both giddy and frightening, knowing that at the bottom might be gold or darkness. Or both.
    Richard said softly, “Stewart?”
    “Over long ago. An undergraduate thing.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.
    “Kevin?”
    “No, never—we’re just friends.”
    “I wasn’t sure. Anyone?”
    “No.”
    He let go of her wrist. Leisha peered at him timidly. He suddenly laughed. “Joy, Leisha.” An echo sounded in her mind, but she couldn’t place it, and then it was gone and she laughed too, a laugh airy and frothy and pink cotton candy in summer.
     
    “Come home, Leisha. He’s had another heart attack.”
    Susan Melling’s voice on the phone was tired. Leisha said, “How bad?”
    “The doctors aren’t sure. Or say they’re not sure. He