A Few Good Men (15 page)

“But that doesn’t explain why Max changed when he—”

“No.” He had picked up a piece of cheese, and now put it on the side of the plate and looked at me. “The thing is, the clones never inherited. You see, they . . . the Mules and their bioengineered servants, had access to all the biological science before the turmoils, and . . . and they developed a method for brain transplant. Yes, I know it’s still risky in most cases, but not with their techniques, not to a clone.”

Silence fell, except for Goldie’s light snoring. I wanted to tell Nat he was wrong. But I was thinking of Javier asking me how I’d managed it in only a few days. I was thinking of a stranger looking out of his eyes. I was thinking of Josia. I heard something between a choked sob and a yell. And Nat’s sympathy made me realize I’d made the sound. Goldie lifted his head and looked at me. “You mean they’re all dead? All of them? All my friends? And do you mean Max . . .”

“Max was killed aboard that space cruiser, probably a few days out of Circum, and your father’s brain inserted into his cranium,” Nat said. “Max . . .” He shrugged. “I hope he didn’t know what was happening. I hope he went to sleep and just never woke up. Sometimes I wake in the night. I hear him talking to me. Sometimes I pray he never knew. Pray!” He looked through me. “I think, you know, that I’ve gone quite insane, this last week, since I found out for sure. One thing is to suspect and the other to know. I think I went unhinged. Worry and pain turned to anger and . . . I’ve done things that I . . .” He looked at his hands, as if they were alien and strange.

“Yes,” I said. It was choked. I wasn’t going to cry in front of Nat Remy, whose eyes looked so much like Ben’s, particularly when they filled with sympathy. I was not going to let him see me break down. I was not. I got up and stumbled to the drinks stand in the room. Not the brandy. I didn’t even like brandy. I grabbed blindly, instead, for a bottle of unopened single malt, and tore at the seals and pulled the cork out. I drank from the bottle, feeling the burn in my throat, the warmth hit my nervous system almost immediately. It had been fifteen years. It hit me like a mule kick, but by that time I was back in the chair, still clutching the bottle. At least any moisture in my eyes would look like reaction to the alcohol.

Nat reached across and took the bottle from my hands, and I was about to protest when he wiped cursorily at the lips of the bottle and threw back a healthy swig, before handing it back. “I killed the bastard,” he said, his voice oddly raspy. “God help me, I killed him slowly. I made him talk. Oh, God, I’d give a lot to forget.”

I stared at him. “Max? You killed Max?” I almost dropped the bottle, but then I saw the horror in his eyes and realized this was a man two steps from the sort of abyss where all you do is scream and scream while life lasts. Out of pity, out of having lived there, on that cold ledge, I extended him a metaphorical hand. “I mean, you killed my father, in Max’s body?”

He nodded. “I didn’t believe it, not really, till I saw the sutures, and the replacement bone under the scalp.” He shuddered, a body-long shudder. “And he talked. About you, among other things. But he talked about you as though you were dead. I thought the suicide attempt when you—when you crushed your nose had worked.” He shrugged. “My father had talked. He’d said . . .” He shook his head. “It wasn’t merciful, what they did to you.”

“Why?” I said. “Why Max and not me? And why the elaborate setup to get me in Never-Never but not let me die? I suppose Hans discovered this? Why did Hans have a brother? For that matter, why did they have Max? Why—”

“I don’t know about Hans. You know what I told you, about genetic characteristics that get flicked off or on due to environment or even gestation?”

I nodded.

“Well, either Hans had some genetic issue that limited his health, or he’d gone through some accident as a child that would also make it possible he’d die young. Whatever the reason, his father knew about it fairly early on, because he had Jan made when Hans was ten. But he might not have been able to wait for Jan. I think he planned to be transferred to Hans, then Jan, but . . . Hans found out. And he, poor bastard, confirmed it somehow. And then he called his friends. Only the Good Man found out he knew.”

“I told them. I betrayed him. I made it possible for them to kill him. I am a monster.”

He gave me a cool look. “You couldn’t have known. How could you have imagined? And he made a bad job of explaining. Would you have done the same if you knew? No. Then you’re not a monster. You made a mistake. We all make mistakes. Sometimes big ones.” He made a face. “The fallibility of human beings is part of my religion, so please stop beating your chest. You’re only human. Anyway, so his father sent Scrubbers. They could have faked an accident, of course. Or they could have made you all disappear, but you see, your father was informed and Max was only three. And your father wasn’t that young. He was at the point where unforeseen disaster can strike the body, so . . .”

“So, he sent me to Never-Never but alive, as an insurance policy. But why was I discarded and Max . . . ?”

“Well, you said you and my uncle, you were . . . non-platonic friends.”

“How delicately put. Yes, very non-platonic.” My voice was incredibly dry in my own ears. I took another swig of the whiskey, then passed it to his extended hand. He took a swig and passed it back.

He gave his cough-laugh, then shook his head. “It’s one of those things no one knows where it comes from or if it is genetic or environmental. I mean, look, it could be either. And with draconian laws in place in most areas governed by Good Men, no one talks frankly enough about it to scientists, either. But if it’s genetic it’s a . . . a combination of factors no one has isolated. As such, it could be one of those things that could get flicked on in gestation. It seems to be hard to control for the person, but that doesn’t mean . . . it’s purely genetic. We just don’t know. But there is a chance it is genetic or at least physical. And if it is . . .”

I remembered my father’s reaction of disgust when he’d heard. I remembered his going to elaborate lengths to avoid being too close to me after that. As though I were carrying some virus. I blinked. “He was afraid of catching it from me? Like an illness?”

“Sort of. I suspect he wasn’t sure whether the body or the brain had the most control in that. I suspect he was afraid he’d find himself trapped in a body that only rose to the wrong occasion. That’s why I asked you if . . .”

“If I had any interest in women?” I remembered vaguely an interview with a psychologist shortly after the scene to end all scenes. “I see. But how did he know it wasn’t a passing fixation? From what I’ve read in old literature, many young men—”

“He didn’t. Of course. But he couldn’t risk it. So he had Max made. Curiously with the same surrogate, who also helped raise him, presumably with the same diet, in the same environment.” Nat shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder about people. I presume your mother was . . . comfortable. Maybe he even loved her, for given values . . . He only arranged her death—don’t look shocked, of course he did—so she couldn’t spot the switch of his brain to Max.”

I wasn’t shocked, though I’d have liked to be. I think I’d already understood it, somewhere along the line. A thought flickered through my mind, and I opened my mouth, but it was none of my business and I didn’t care. I just didn’t care. I changed what I was going to say. “You mean, the whole thing was scripted from the moment he found out I’d rather—”

“It’s possible no,” he said. “I mean, Max was created, sure. But it’s possible that you’d simply have been disinherited on some other excuse, and Max would have become heir, and you’d have been allowed to live out your life . . . Until Hans. Then you had to be kept somewhere safe and where you couldn’t talk. I think they first thought the regular jail was fine. You were by nature reserved, and if you had Ben, you would not get in more trouble than . . . But Uncle Benjamin wouldn’t leave the matter alone even in jail, so they had to get you to kill him, so they had an excuse to say you were dangerous and slam you into Never-Never and into solitary. Then you could be kept alive, in the unlikely event something happened to Max and your father needed a transfer immediately.”

“The interrogation sessions they gave me—surely they would have realized I didn’t know anything.”

He shook his head. “I suspect you knew most of it, at some level. You just hadn’t added it up. You wouldn’t accept this so easily now, otherwise. But you could have figured it out consciously at any time. Besides, some of the Good Men, maybe all of them, take a long time to break.” He paused and blinked. “Trust me, I know that.” He grabbed for the bottle and drank again. “Since they weren’t willing to do radical damage to your body, they might have thought you were still faking it.”

“Ah.” I drank. “And that,” I said, “is why my father had me put in solitary for fourteen years? He didn’t care if I went completely insane?”

“Your mind was not their concern,” he said. “As long as your body was healthy. And frankly, that only as a backup.”

I lifted my left wrist and showed him the scar which included whorls where the muscle and tendons could not be knit together right, because the prison hospital had to patch it before my father had me flown to a regen center. “I tried to gnaw through my wrist. I got to the vein.”

He looked disturbed. “I know. I know. He . . . told me. Not-Max.”

“Yeah.”

Nat took the bottle away from me, took it back to the liquor table and corked it forcefully. I’d have protested but I was afraid if I followed him, I’d fall on my face. He took a silvery contraption from the serving cart and pressed buttons. After a while, he put a beverage in front of me. It wasn’t coffee. I’ve seen coffee. This looked and smelled like coffee’s big brother, the one that beat up coffee and stole its lollipop. “Drink it,” he said. “You’re in a bind, and we can’t discuss it while you’re out-of-your-mind drunk.”

“I’m not drunk,” I said, and hiccupped. My voice resounded oddly in my head, as though it came from very far away. “It’s just been too long since I drank any alcohol.”

“Of course, and I should have stopped you. Drink the damn coffee.”

You don’t argue with crazy people and any servant of a Good Man who orders the Good Man around is by definition a crazy bastard—not that I had any reason to doubt Mrs. Remy’s fidelity. I drank the bitter liquid, even though back when I was in this world, back when I thought I was human in the society of humans, I used to take sugar and milk in my coffee. Which was not as strong as that one. I felt it fight its way down, possibly with an armed force, and land on my stomach like a ton of concrete. Acid concrete.

“What do you mean, a bind?” I asked.

“Well, you . . . oh, hell, you probably couldn’t have escaped it, anyway. The closest parallel is Simon. St. Cyr. And I think the only reason he is alive is that his father is not dead, but in a coma. He was in a flyer accident, and is comatose. There’s the possibility, more remote every year, that he’ll wake up and that those he had alliances with will have their old friend back. Because of that, they don’t kill St. Cyr and take back Liberte Seacity. It’s my fault. If I had thought there was the slightest chance you were alive and would claim your inheritance, I’d have put the bastard in a coma, not killed him.”

I grinned at him. I don’t know why, because I wasn’t even vaguely happy. “Not your fault. This is a damned macabre comedy. It’s no one’s fault but the bastards—Mules. Good Men. Whatever you call them.”

“Yes, but . . . now they’re going to try to take you out. They will all turn their forces on this seacity and try to take it out. Mind you, you’re not alone in that situation. Jan killed his father, in Never-Never when they broke in. I wasn’t with them. I was . . . busy. But Simon told me. I don’t think Jan has let the news get out. But they will, sooner or later. He can’t pretend to be his father, not forever.”

“Two against fifty?” I said. “We’re going to get destroyed. I’m sorry I . . . They’re going to destroy the entire household, servants and retainers and all, aren’t they? We’re all dead men walking.”

He grimaced. “Two against forty-eight. Possibly three against forty-seven. And this is no different than it would have been. Lucius, with not-Max’s suspicious death, chances are that at least upper-level retainers would be killed, or at least extensively interrogated. I shouldn’t have killed him, but . . .” He blinked. “I couldn’t take extensive interrogation, and my father . . .” He paused. “We were considering how best to go to our people when you appeared.”

I thought that was the most elegant euphemism for suicide I’d ever heard. The man had a turn for the memorable phrase. He should have been a storyteller.

“At any rate, when you showed up, I thought we’d file for legal recognition, and do it in such a way they wouldn’t be sure you weren’t Dante, while we marshaled a plan of campaign. But now our hand is forced, and of course, even if St. Cyr joins in—and I suspect . . . well, never mind. There’s a chance he will. Possibly a good chance. And even if a couple more of the heirs of Good Men who have found out the truth, er . . . force succession and join in . . . well . . . I think, you know, that you’re going to need other help. You’re going to need a lot of help. I have an idea, but I can’t reveal it to you until I talk to some other people. I’ve already talked to Martha and asked her to pass the question on. Upward to the organization my uncle Benjamin and I . . .”

“Martha?” I said, still troubled by the idea that Ben had had some great work he’d never told me about.

“My twin sister.” He made a face. “Possibly my best friend, besides Max. Though I’m fairly close to Abigail, as well. The other four are all too young. Debra is just a baby. Though at thirteen, James is starting to understand things, but—”

“Seven?” I said. “There are seven of you?” The upper-class retainers tended to small families, though I suppose there wasn’t a law against large ones. It was just that I’d grown up thinking of large families as something of lower classes and religious fanatics. “How Usaian-fertile of your family.”

He looked startled, and I said “Beg your pardon,” because one doesn’t accuse a near stranger of belonging to a proscribed religion, and besides, Usaians lived in little, peculiar enclaves. Which I supposed explained nuttiness like the Sons of Liberty. Hothouse environments and all that.