A Few Good Men (21 page)

“The what?” Was this religion? I’d stayed away from religion most of my life. As far as I knew, my father didn’t have any. I’d not been taught any. Now that I thought about it, if what Nat had said was true and we were made-beings, there was no religion on Earth that would accept us. After all, we didn’t have souls. Which, now I thought about it, sounded about right.

I was sure my father didn’t have a soul, at least. And if I had one, I’d never found it.

I didn’t know if there was life after death. I was almost sure that Ben lived only in my own head. And though in moments of despair, I’d almost prayed, I didn’t do it according to anyone’s dictates. And besides, now I thought about it, I didn’t think the Usaians even believed in a real God. Well, not as such. Something about the inherent goodness of mankind. Even if flawed goodness.

“Lucius!” Nat said, urgently, and I realized I’d snorted.

“I read it while in Never-Never, yes. I could recite some of it, if I tried.”

“Okay, okay, basics. What about the Declaration of Independence, to begin with. Do you believe in natural, God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”

All right. Nathaniel Remy was insane. God-given rights. That sounded so nice. Where had God been when Ben had been killed miserably? Where had He been when I’d been thrown into a cell for fourteen years? And don’t get me started on the pursuit of happiness.

And yet, I knew—I knew beyond all reason—that I was expected to say yes. Whatever these people were doing was supposed to make me and the city safe. Nat had said as much, if not directly clearly enough. And I knew he wanted me to say yes. So, what could I do?

But the thing is I didn’t—couldn’t—believe in God-given rights. Not really. I wasn’t even sure I believed in God. “Uh,” I said. I said it as though it meant something. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen any God come out to defend those rights for anyone.”

This time Nat snorted. He muttered something that sounded like “cork head” but which might have been ruder, then said, “No one believes God will defend them. We just believe they proceed from a source outside human granting. That they’re inalienable and should be so. Mere law can’t strip them away. Humans didn’t give them and therefore can’t abrogate them. You are supposed to defend them for yourself and others, because they’re supposed to have them. Do you believe in that?”

I felt vaguely sick and couldn’t think straight. Did I believe in those? I was supposed to defend their rights, was I? How well had I done at defending Ben’s right to life? Or for that matter Hans’s? They’d both died, rights or no rights. As for Liberty. “It’s mumbo jumbo,” I said. My voice came out as a growl.

Now Nat sounded almost pleading. “Lucius. Would you believe it if you . . . I mean, do you think it’s something that society should strive for?”

“What? Nathaniel Remy.” His full name, as they’d called it, with the middle name I’d never heard, pushed itself into my mind, and there was something associated with that name, something I’d read about. “Nathaniel Greene Remy. Are you an Usaian?”

Martha made a choked sound. Someone within the room shouted, though I couldn’t tell what. Nat said, “Damn it.” And then the door closed, and Nat was on this side, holstering his burner, grabbing my forearm in a death grip. My mind was still turning over, turning over things I’d half heard from my father and at my father’s councils while I was growing up. Things I had read. Things I had thought.

Sam, Nat, Martha, Abigail. No. My house was shot through with Usaians. “Going to our people,” Nat had said, and I’d thought he meant suicide. No. It meant taking refuge somewhere. Ben. Oh. Ben. It couldn’t be. He’d have told me. Wouldn’t he have told me? He’d kept secrets from me. Why had he? What had really been going on?

Nat had a grip on my arm and was dragging me across the room, to the corner most distant from the door. Martha started to rise, but Nat looked back over his shoulder at her, and his face must have told her something, because she sat down again, her eyes very wide.

And meanwhile my mind, my relentless mind, kept turning over the facts. The council of twelve. Tried by twelve. The thought came from somewhere and a saying about being tried by twelve, rather than carried by six. Protecting their own. Giving me protection. To protect me from the other Good Men, I’d need an army. Army. Most Usaians were peaceful in an almost dopey sort of way. Having lost their country and been sent into exile—those who escaped with their lives, about ten percent of them, if the books were right—through what seemed in retrospect an excess of holding back force and noblesse oblige, they kept mouthing about Manifest Destiny and other nonsense, and talking about the arrival of their prophet who was supposed to be the new George, in reference to Washington. And the new George would set everything right.

But there were the hotheads, the unrepentant bastards. There were those who said God helped those who helped themselves, and that nothing would happen without strife: the Sons and Daughters of Liberty. They could have been spun off into an independent sect, but Usaians would have to expel them and most of them—from what I’d read—seemed afraid to expel wind. So instead, the hotheads had been spun off or spun themselves off into an armed branch. The Sons of Liberty. It occurred to me I didn’t know what they actually did. The Good Men tended to attribute any violent protest or act of rebellion to them. They tended to use it as an excuse to initiate massacres of hidden Usaians, or sweeps to destroy their information-dissemination branches. And to keep the hatred burning against the Usaians. And to keep the Usaians in fear so they didn’t try anything.

But Nat had brought me here and submitted me to the judgment of the twelve. And he’d said they could protect me. And he was hell on a broom, good with a burner, and he’d killed Ma—my father.

Nat shoved me into the corner, put his hand on my chest, as though to hold me in place, glared at me. Before he could open his mouth, I said, “Benjamin Franklin Remy, right?”

It caught him off balance. His hand pulled back a little. “What?”

“His full name was Benjamin Franklin Remy, wasn’t it? And he never told me. He never told me, not even as he was dying.”

Nat blinked, his black eyes which normally showed nothing, looked momentarily stricken. “He couldn’t tell you,” he said. “He’d sworn an oath. The only way to leave is to die, and if he’d broken his oath, he’d have died anyway.”

I swallowed hard. I felt as if I had a fever. It was like a headache without a headache, a pain I couldn’t feel physically but felt nonetheless. “He died anyway,” I said. As I clenched my fists. “He died anyway.” I clutched onto anger. I wanted to be angry, because if I weren’t I was going to start to cry, and I suspected if I started to cry, I’d never stop. “And he never told me.” I swallowed hard. “He never told me he was in the Sons of Liberty.”

Nat took a step back, and looked up at me, and for once his expression was readable. He looked confused, and also oddly guilty, and naked and vulnerable. He’d not have looked more vulnerable if I were holding a knife to his throat.

“And you’re with the Sons of Liberty too,” I said. I pointed at the door. “Your sister Abigail is in the council of the twelve. How can she be? How can you let her? She’s what? Twenty? She’s a child.”

“We can swear oaths at sixteen,” he said, and swallowed. “And Abigail was elected. Look, the Sons of Liberty are not what you think, we—”

“How do you know what I think?”

“We’re not what the news say. No, we don’t believe in taking everything lying down, but we have rules and councils and deci—”

“Don’t care, Nathaniel Greene Remy. Don’t give me soft talk. I’ve had enough of that and more. You’re in an armed insurrection. Your whole family is part of it and—”

“Not my whole family,” he said, hurriedly. “Not all of them. My parents, and my other siblings might believe in Usaian principles, but they—”

I snorted. “Don’t care. Just tell me what you want of me. Why have you brought me here? What do you want of me?”

Nat brought out his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, shook it to start it, as he put the case back. His hand shook. “I want to protect you,” he said, and sucked in smoke as if his life depended on it, while he stared up at me in a mixture of fear and something else I couldn’t quite define. Why was he afraid of me? “I want to keep you alive,” he said. “And there’s only one way to do that and that’s to call on the Sons of Liberty and their associated groups. The sans cou—other groups that get less press.”

I shook my head. I shook it hard. “Honeypot” formed itself in my head. I’d read it in novels of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Honeypot was a seductive person, usually a female, of course, at least when approaching a male, who could convince people to act against their best principles—who could sometimes convince them to act against their best wishes. All to benefit some cause or conspiracy. I couldn’t quite put things together. Not rationally. My throat had gone all tight, and I felt like I was going to throw up. “Not that,” I told Nat’s scared gaze. “Not now. I mean, what do you want of me? What did you people always want of me? Why did you . . . Why did Ben . . . Why was Ben thrown at me? Did he even want . . .” I couldn’t breathe and my chest hurt. I felt like I was going to drop dead of a heart attack, right here, right now, after all my failed suicide attempts.

“What?” Nat asked, and seemed genuinely surprised, but the fear was still there, haunting and dark behind his eyes. “I just want to protect you. You were Uncle Benjamin’s . . . You were Uncle Benjamin’s. The only family he had beside us. He’d want you kept safe and alive.”

“He was making reports from prison,” I said, and my voice came out squeaky and raspy, both, as if the sound was having trouble making it past my throat. “To . . . to whom? How?”

“We had . . .” Nat licked his lips. “We have a network. It’s not very good or very big. When we can, we’d like to . . . that is . . . When we can we save our own.” He seemed to catch something in my eyes, some accusation I couldn’t even make. “We were . . . they were, I was too young to know anything, of course, but I understand they’d organized a rescue, but it was all gone before . . . My uncle was dead.”

Like that made things better. So, rescue had been on the way if I’d let Ben live a little longer. Suffer a little longer. If I could have endured his pain, he might be alive today. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, my sore aching feet. If there was a God up there, any God, he was a stone cold bastard, much worse than I was, and I was a monster.

“Look,” Nat said, he threw his cigarette at his feet and stomped on it. He opened his hands and showed me the palms, in a gesture of defenselessness. “Look, I want to save you. My family and I might escape if you fell, but I . . . But I don’t think I could live with it. Not now.” He looked up and said a word that I didn’t think was in his vocabulary. “Please,” he said. “Please.” I had no idea what he was asking me for, though, and it didn’t help. I backed up against the corner of the wall, glad for its coolness. I felt an odd longing for my cell, away from everyone.

“Listen,” he reached forward and grabbed at my sleeve. “Listen, it’s important, it’s the only way I know to keep you safe. Please, please, please, listen to me. I . . .” He hesitated. He looked at me with Ben’s dark haunted eyes. “I beg you to agree that you believe in the basic founding principles. I beg you to say you believe everyone is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then we can put you through the learning program, and while you’re learning we can protect you.” His hand clutched the ruffles on my sleeve hard, and his fingers bit at my wrist with something like desperation. “It’s not just for you, though . . . though I want you to stay alive. It’s for us, too. We’ve been unable to do anything for centuries. No one will pay any attention to rebels and our charter doesn’t allow us to cause enough damage to civilians and innocents to intimidate the population. And even if it did, they would be more likely to turn on us. They view the Good Men as safety and sane government, and if we oppose them openly, we get painted as monsters. Even if the other Good Men are against us, if we have one on our side, we have a measure of respectability and we can get—”

And now I had it. The final piece in place. Ben had been a honeypot. And Nat had been one to Max. Pursuing the goal of subverting the Good Man’s heir before he inherited. Intending to have a Good Man on their side. For the good of the cause.

They could join at sixteen. Ben and I . . . at sixteen. I felt as though I’d been beaten, every inch of my body pummeled. I was tired. I wanted to be back in my cell. I wanted to be dead. “Was that what you were trying to do with Max?” I said. “Corrupt him into your crazy religion? Did he know what you were? Did you tell him? Did you tell him why?”

“What?” He looked genuinely shocked, but of course he would. If they started training them at thirteen—“What? No. I couldn’t tell Max. I didn’t want to risk him.” He looked very pale. “That has nothing to do with this. Please, just say you believe for now.”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“No, I don’t believe. I don’t believe in any natural rights, and I’m not sure that your vision of paradise is good for anyone, much less for everyone. I’ve studied history, Nathaniel Greene Remy. I know what your beloved paradise was really like. The bickering. The wars. The bloody stupidity. And the lack of organization. The cross-purpose efforts. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work in our far more complex world.”

But he was looking at me, so pale his hair looked dark by comparison. That and because it looked wet with sweat. Or at least I presumed with sweat, unless someone had upended a bucket of water on his head. “Oh, God,” he said, looking up at me as if I’d grown a second head. “You can’t mean—you can’t believe—”

I didn’t want to hear it. If I’d had the energy, I’d have punched him. But I didn’t. Instead, I turned and stumbled out of there, at a half run. I was half-aware of his running behind me, and I don’t know if he followed me all the way to the street. At least, he didn’t catch up with me, because when I got to the end of the street and climbed on my broom to go through the mechanical spider, he didn’t follow me.