A Few Good Men (41 page)

But he’d pulled his fingers out of my reach, looked at them and laughed. “Pastel, Lucius. Not some weird kind of green, alien blood. I was by the window, trying to get the landscape. A forlorn task. Strangely, the new fingers have to learn from scratch. Odd, isn’t it? The mind knows, but the body has to learn.”

That too was the theme of my second week in paradise. As I started being able to get on my feet without passing out from tiredness, I found that my left arm needed to be taught everything that it had known before. It did not move as precisely as it had. It was like my arm and my fingers had minds of their own. And yet, Nat remained incredibly patient. Even when I was fully walking and went downstairs, and strolled—slowly and in a measured way—around the farmyard, he accompanied me, like a shadow.

Towards the end of the second week, stung by my continued weakness, my inability to do the simplest things, annoyed at him for seeing it when I didn’t want to be a pampered princeling and I wanted to stand on my own two feet, I turned on him and told him a lot of foolish things, including, “You don’t have to shadow me. You’re not my nanny. And, damn you, I don’t want your gratitude.”

He’d looked shocked for a moment, I think not so much by what I’d said as by my rudeness. Nat was one of those people whom rudeness would always shock. He could understand violence and hatred, but not wanton nastiness in social intercourse. But once the shock passed, amusement lit up his dark eyes, and his lips tilted upward the slightest bit. “I’m not doing anything out of gratitude, Luce. If I were, I’d be kicking you in the shins when no one was looking. I don’t like being beholden. I don’t like doing things because I have to. I’m doing what I am because, annoying though you are, I’d feel bad if you fell and broke your head. I have a strong feeling that I’d feel saddened by it, and I hate to feel sad.” And thus, leaving me without any retort, he’d continued shadowing me.

By the third week I was fine, but he postponed our starting our work amid the locals with some mumbled excuse. In time I came to understand it was because he too needed some time to take a deep, relieved breath, in this case his relief coming from the fact that I was finally recovered and would not be impaired my whole life—something he didn’t tell me he and the medtechs feared but apparently they had.

That week was spent by him—in cabal with the Longs’ irredeemable offspring—in teaching me to fish, making me help to feed the chickens and muck out the pigs, picking of wild berries for preserving, and finally, taking me hunting.

“It’s a favor we do them,” Nat explained of the hunting. “And not just because it gets more meat in storage for the winter, but because deer run rampant around here and are a problem with the crops. Deer and wild pigs. Bear and wolves haven’t made it back, nearly as much. There were fewer of them, and they were more affected by the scarcity and the plagues-gone-wrong unleashed at the end of the twenty-first. So the pigs are the biggest predators—descended from what used to be farm pigs, but you’d never know it. And the deer are everywhere and by themselves are holding back the regreening of the continent.”

The regreening didn’t even surprise me or arouse my curiosity, until Nat and I did start on our mission for the cause, flying through primeval-looking forests, to find isolated farm families and sound them out on their opinions. Turned out we were a perfect team. Nat, carefully raised by a good and pious family, could put on his expression of concern, his best manners, and somehow look five inches shorter and five years younger and thoroughly inoffensive, even when asking people the most outrageously personal questions about their beliefs. And I could loom beside him, silent and vaguely threatening by reason of bulk alone, reminding them that anything they attempted against him wouldn’t end well.

I’d like to say my services in protecting him were needed very often, but the fact was that most of people we met were decent and kind and, even if most were not quite as materially well off as the Longs, they were good people. They received us with open arms, and talked with the free flowing talk of people who hadn’t seen strangers in a good long while and were starving for news of the outside world. And if some of them suspected we were a couple—some seemed to in the way they linked our destinies, by asking if we meant to clear a farm, the implication being we’d do it together—very few even raised eyebrows, much less saying anything ruder. And we met a few of our kind, too, none of whom seemed more or less accepted than anyone else around them. Or better or worse. In fact, the two times we got in serious trouble, one was when some older farmer took it into his head we were a danger to his daughter, and another when one of two men, more or less clearly a couple— Never mind. The situations never went beyond what could be managed by my pulling a burner and covering our retreat. There was never fire actually exchanged, and we stayed away from those two farms in the future.

More often, we came home with jars of jam and invitations to us and the Longs to come to the next . . . whatever the popular local entertainment was, most of it self-staged, the Fall Dance, the Theater Performance, the Philosophical Debate. Yes, those were all more or less at the same level of providing amusement for the masses, which probably is a good snapshot of how isolated and bored these people were, even with holo recordings and other modern facilities. Because of the controls put on long distance communications, all the holo and general broadcast stations were where the transmission could be controlled by censors. There were none close enough to echo out here. Most broadcast didn’t reach this far, and most of them were starving for novelty. I attributed their strange hospitality to that.

“Partly,” Nat said. “But partly because the distance between farms encourages minding your own business, and the type of people who do well out here are . . . remember the outliers I talked about? People who don’t feel quite at home in society. Stands to reason. People don’t go out and start life again in what could be a dangerous environment unless they are truly unhappy where they are. So they tend to leave each other alone. But we are social animals, and so they have to socialize. The result is strict rules about hospitality and, well, a broad tolerance for those who are different, even the very different. Before you came, I met this old guy who lives with three pigs. All the pigs were a feral liter, raised from piglets. The weird thing was not that he didn’t eat them, or that he talked to them. No, the weird thing is that he thought they talked back. Worse, he seemed convinced they were related to him. One of the shoats wore an apron . . . But all his neighbors treated him and spoke of him as if he were only a little funny.”

As for the mission, it prospered. Most of the people this far out were either Usaians or readily willing to sympathize with the cause of getting rid of the Good Men. Most of them were willing to pledge entire cellar-fulls of preserved berries and bushels of dried deer meat to providing for the eventual troops. Not that this was universal. What Nat had said about oddities living around here, and the oddest ones were the ones who were vehement supporters of the Good Men and of genetic purity—whatever that might mean—and of order and stability.

This was why Nat was always the one to talk first. He’d sound people out by degrees, always taking the next conversational step in a way that he could backtrack from and deny everything. I can honestly say not a single person of those who disagreed with us had any idea that he didn’t agree with them as well.

“This is all going to erupt, too, isn’t it? When the fight becomes open?” I said.

“I think so,” he said. “Tolerance and laissez-faire have limits and people tend to get swept up in larger movements, and I think our war will set fire to the entire world. There will be war in these woods, in these farms. There will be people hanged and farms set ablaze. There was in the first revolution and there will be again. Human nature doesn’t change that much.”

And when I looked as I felt—like I was bringing death to paradise—he said, “Don’t worry, Luce. It will be better when it’s done. Not perfect, but for most people it will be better.”

And on the way back home, sitting in a grove of some tree that was not pine—the only tree I knew on sight—sharing a lunch of cheese and walnuts, I’d asked him, “How come these massive trees? If history is right, even three hundred years ago nothing grew here, because of the biophage bacteria. But these look like they’ve been here for millennia. Does history lie or—”

“Nah,” he cut off a piece of cheese with his knife. He didn’t smoke when we were in the middle of the forest, probably afraid of what a careless ash-flick might do, but he always looked like he wanted to, like his hands were restless and he didn’t know what to do with them. “It’s just that in the USA, before the fall, they’d developed faster-growing trees: for paper, for furniture, even for landscaping. For some reason those seeds proved hardier than the natural ones. When the bacteria consumed themselves and vegetation could return, it came back very fast. I suspect in twenty years the problem will not be allowing the regreening to occur, but keeping the trees in check enough for fields to be planted and for humans to establish some sort of traffic between populated areas.” Then he’d laughed. “But I suspect the seacities can use the wood, and making wood furniture a fad beyond the richest households shouldn’t be all that difficult either.”

I often remember that lunch—just the two of us under the trees, hours of broom-flight in each direction from any human—as one of the more perfect moments of my life. And even though the world was going to hell in our absence, for the three months I helped Nat scout resources in the northern North American continent I was happy as I’d never been before, not even when I was young and thought I lived a charmed life.

It couldn’t last. I think I knew it even then. I knew that the world would intrude, probably in painful ways, soon enough. Knowing it put an extra golden glow on those days. We weren’t together all the time. For one, young volunteers poured into the farm, camping at the edge, and Nat often spent mornings trying to teach them the arts of war, whatever those were. But most afternoons we were together and when we were “home,” as we’d taken to referring to the Longs’ place, we helped with farm chores, and I think one of the proudest moments of my life was when Mr. Long looked up, seeing me help load one of the servo-wagons to take corn back to the barn for storage for winter, and said, “You’d not make a half-bad farmer, son.” Weird to be so proud of that praise. And odd to be so stung by the rumination that followed, “Of course, even with robots, farming is not something you want to do alone. Else you become like that good old boy Rogers, him who talks to his pigs.”

But the sense that the golden time was coming to an end rushed in on me with greater speed the closer we got to winter. Perhaps it was the chill in the air, the fact that most of the trees-that-weren’t-pines were standing naked, looking vaguely forlorn and like they were holding their arms up for mercy to the sky. Or perhaps it was the sense that something this good couldn’t last.

Before I knew anything was wrong, or precisely what might be wrong, I noticed that Nat sometimes looked worried when he read something in his portable holo reader. Since this usually happened after a trip to a relatively large settlement, I asked him if those were news gems, and he’d tell me no. But he never told me what they were. It was weeks before I found out that they were news gems of a sort, but the kind that was passed amid Usaians and which had internal news of our organization, which is to say news of my seacity which was now, openly, under our control.

But Nat didn’t tell me, and those last two weeks, the most exciting thing going on in my life—despite all my misgivings—was our preparation of the Fall Festival, the big self-made entertainment in our area, hosted by the Longs in one of their outlying barns. This year, possibly at the suggestion of Nat, who knew how much I’d enjoyed reading the plays, it was to be a staging of
Midsummer Night’s Dream
by the ancient Shakespeare, adapted and changed to Glaish, of course, but still much the same play, and not a bad one to welcome the shorter days and colder nights we knew were coming, nor the storm of blood and pain most people didn’t know yet loomed over them.

Nat’s and my part in the entertainment consisted of—helped by the Longs’ brood, who were to be rewarded by being allowed to pad the numbers of forest fairies in the play—helping to clean the cavernous empty barn, setting out the stored benches for people to sit in and devising the decoration and lighting of the stage. Nat painted scenery too, for the first time giving me a glimpse of his ability to suggest an entire forest, or a brilliant night sky with a few old boards, a few dabs of paint and a few lines drawn just right. Goldie, of course, helped both our efforts and the play, the night it was staged, by getting in everyone’s way, licking faces at the most inopportune moment, and, once, getting tangled in an array of lights we’d just put up by chasing some small creature—a rat or a squirrel—behind the stage. It had all ended with Goldie covered in lights and looking offended in his dignity because we couldn’t stop laughing at him.

Then, on the night, everything went well until the last act. Then, as Hippolyta and Theseus wed in brilliant if makeshift grandeur upon the stage, and Nat and I sat side by side on a bench, trying to ignore that the old man and his pigs were sitting behind us and keeping up a lively conversation, even if we could only hear one side of it, someone came into the auditorium.

I wasn’t aware of it. We were laughing at the fact that the players—Jane being Hippolyta—were doing their best to ignore Goldie even while he put his paws on their shoulders and tried to lick their faces. Someone leaned over Nat and said something.

His laughter stopped abruptly, and he turned. The person leaning over him was in full broomer attire and the first thing I thought was that she looked too old to be a broomer. Not that she looked . . . Well, she was slim, and clearly in good shape, but that close it was impossible not to notice that her face looked weathered and bore upon it the marks of living far more than twenty-some years, or even thirty. Her hair might have had some white in it, but that was impossible to tell, because it was the exact same color as Nat’s. And that was the second thing that hit me—how much she looked like Nat.