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hurt. Going backstage with Daddy, she thought she could hardly breathe. Kenzo Yagai!
    But backstage was more crowded than she had expected. Therewere cameras everywhere. Daddy said, “Mr. Yagai, may I present my daughter Leisha,” and the cameras moved in close and fast—on her . A Japanese man whispered something in Kenzo Yagai’s ear, and he looked more closely at Leisha. “Ah, yes.”
    “Look over here, Leisha,” someone called, and she did. A robot camera zoomed so close to her face that Leisha stepped back, startled. Daddy spoke very sharply to someone, then to someone else. The cameras didn’t move. A woman suddenly knelt in front of Leisha and thrust a microphone at her. “What does it feel like to never sleep, Leisha?”
    “What?”
    Someone laughed. The laugh was not kind. “Breeding geniuses…”
    Leisha felt a hand on her shoulder. Kenzo Yagai gripped her very firmly, and pulled her away from the cameras. Immediately, as if by magic, a line of Japanese men formed behind Yagai, parting only to let Daddy through. Behind the line, the three of them moved into a dressing room, and Kenzo Yagai shut the door.
    “You must not let them bother you, Leisha,” he said in his wonderful accent. “Not ever. There is an old Asian proverb: ‘The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.’ You must never let your individual caravan be slowed by the barking of rude or envious dogs.”
    “I won’t,” Leisha breathed, not sure yet what the words really meant, knowing there was time later to sort them out, to talk about them with Daddy. For now she was dazzled by Kenzo Yagai, the actual man himself who was changing the world without force, without guns, by trading his special individual efforts. “We study your philosophy at my school, Mr. Yagai.”
    Kenzo Yagai looked at Daddy. Daddy said, “A private school. But Leisha’s sister also studies it, although cursorily, in the public system. Slowly, Kenzo, but it comes. It comes.” Leisha noticed that he did not say why Alice was not here tonight with them.
    Back home, Leisha sat in her room for hours, thinking over everything that had happened. When Alice came home from Julie’s the next morning, Leisha rushed toward her. But Alice seemed angry about something.
    “Alice—what is it?”
    “Don’t you think I have enough to put up with at school already?” Alice shouted. “Everybody knows, but at least when you stayed quiet it didn’t matter too much! They’d stopped teasing me! Why did you have to do it?”
    “Do what?” Leisha said, bewildered.
    Alice threw something at her: a hard-copy morning paper, on newsprint flimsier than the Camden systems used. The paper dropped open at Leisha’s feet. She stared at her own picture, three columns wide, with Kenzo Yagai. The headline said, “Yagai and the Future: Room for the Rest of Us? Y-Energy Inventor Confers With ‘Sleep-Free’ Daughter of Mega-Financier Roger Camden.”
    Alice kicked the paper. “It was on TV last night too—on TV . I work hard not to look stuck-up or creepy, and you go and do this! Now Julie probably won’t even invite me to her slumber party next week!” She rushed up the broad curving stairs to her room.
    Leisha looked down at the paper. She heard Kenzo Yagai’s voice in her head: The dogs bark but the caravan moves on . She looked at the empty stairs. Aloud she said, “Alice—your hair looks really pretty curled like that.”

4
    I want to meet the rest of them,” Leisha said. “Why have you kept them from me this long?”
    “I haven’t kept them from you at all,” Camden said. “Not offering is not the same as denial. Why shouldn’t you be the one to do the asking? You’re the one who now wants it.”
    Leisha looked at him. She was fifteen, in her last year at the Sauley School. “Why didn’t you offer?”
    “Why should I?”
    “I don’t know,” Leisha said. “But you gave me everything else.”
    “Including the freedom to ask for what you want.”
    Leisha looked