A Few Good Men (47 page)

He drank his coffee and I gave him more coffee. “I know how to make biscuits,” I said.

The unholy amusement again, this time with a little smile. “Impressive,” he said. Then there was a long silence. “We were asleep,” he said, at last. “We were asleep, but of course . . . there were sentinels. We didn’t know. We were . . . where I was, we were the first to be attacked. They blocked the entrances. They threw exploding canisters and gas canisters inside. They . . . People were burning in the room, the first room they . . . and people wanted to go in and help, and I had them seal the exit, so they . . . I always have to tamp down the berserker. Berserking is lousy for a soldier, and this time . . . I was scared and shocked and shaking so much I almost couldn’t walk. But I had to. And I led them . . . I led all five thousand of us . . . I. There was a tunnel and I thought we’d be trapped like rats. And I—” He covered his face with his hands, and he shook. And I thought he was crying, or maybe he wasn’t, but in either case I didn’t have a right to violate his privacy by looking, and I didn’t have the right to touch him, and any comfort I could offer would fall so short of the mark as to make it worse.

And I thought the problem is that they had trained and they had gone on trips and they’d had live-fire exercises, but in the end we didn’t have soldiers. We had boys who had been trained for war, like their fathers and grandfathers, but who’d never thought it would come in their day. Not even Nat.

I got up. I got the plates. I dropped them into the cleaner. I came back. I sat down. I stretched out my hand and clasped his shoulder. He leaned almost imperceptibly into my grasp and shook.

After a while Nat stopped shaking, and removed his hands from his face. He didn’t look like he’d been crying. He took a deep breath and said, in a perfectly normal voice, “We lost about thirty percent of our people, but seventy percent of us got out. Not just where I was. Everywhere. We were sent back to our seacities of origin if . . . if they’re at risk of attack. I should be down at quarters, but . . . I don’t know why I’m here. It was odd to wake up in your bed.” And then after a pause. “And you’d better burn those sheets. There’s been an outbreak of lice.”

That’s all I ever got out of him about the incident where he was one of the principals, indeed the one without whom no one else would have escaped. Within days, our people started calling it the Broken River Massacre. It didn’t take me long to learn that Nat’s part in it was far more heroic and far less casual than he made it sound. Not that I learned much more. Nat never mentioned it again and, save for a burn scar up the side of his left thigh which he refuses to have regened away, there is nothing else I can add.

Nat went somewhere to report mid-afternoon, but they told him to quarter wherever he was and to stay on call. He came back to my house, after stopping by his parents’ house to get his civilian clothes. He didn’t have another uniform and there was no point wearing it around the seacity anyway. That night, when I came back from my duties, such as they were, I found he had set up the small dining table in my bedroom, and he had managed to turn on enough of the machines in my kitchen to have a decent dinner made, if not in the style I used to be served.

“The children will be counting on me for dinner,” I said.

“Nah. I went over. I told them I was going to steal you tonight. They were happy to see me, so they’re willing to let me keep you away. Mind you—for one meal only, Tom said.” He turned serious. “We need to talk. There are things that need to be done if we’re going to turn this and I can’t get my parents to understand. I can’t get anyone to understand. I think it might be time for us to take the matter in our own hands and the bit between our teeth, so to speak, and do a little unapproved action. And I’ve been talking to Simon and . . .” He looked at me, puzzled. “What are you laughing at?”

“Not laughing,” I said. “Smiling. You told me to remember I wasn’t a teenage boy on a lark.”

His features relaxed and he even smiled a little. “I was so worried that night,” he said. “With my dad and James in jeopardy. I was worried you’d get in the middle of it too.” He paused. “But sometimes, Luce, one does need to do things that people back home don’t get. We’ve been fighting this war on their terms, and on their terms, Luce, they win and we all die. I’m not willing to let that happen. I’m not going to say on my terms we win and they all die, but there is at least a chance.”

“All right,” I said. “We eat. You talk.”

The gist of it was that we were being strangled by energy dependence—the powerpods came through Circum Terra, a scientific and energy processing station in Earth orbit, which we didn’t control. And we were being killed on communications, the second tying up with the fact we were so badly outnumbered. “There are a lot of people who would come to our side immediately, and a lot of others, probably half or more than half—the Good Men have got that intrusive and people, at least see the waste and the fraud—who’d come to our side with a little persuasion, a little appeal to their prejudices, their inborn hatreds,” Nat said. He was smoking again, having procured cigarettes during the day. “But they won’t because we can’t communicate with them. And the knot to this communications problem is in Circum Terra too. That’s where the dampening mechanisms are that keep the communications of Earth locked down, so that only the transmitters the Good Men have built with the bypasses they enforce can broadcast to the entire Earth.”

“It’s very easy, then,” I told him. “We’ll go to Circum Terra and rearrange things, so the energy gets sent to our own receiver—we have a receiver, right, or we can build one? And so that the communications will be freed. Problem solved.”

He was looking at me, his eyes dark and serious. “You know, I’m approached by a lot of people who think I’m a legend, simply because you rescued me.”

I blinked at him. “All I do is make these stupid little broadcasts, just for Olympus.”

“Um.” He nodded. “Perhaps. Mother and Father— Luce, what in the name of the founders are you doing making lists of your property that’s to go back to the seacity?”

“Yeah, I know, waste of time. I told your father I’d be happy with a stuffed giraffe and a piece of flag, and they could have all the rest. I meant, it was all, ultimately stolen from the people.”

Nat made a rude noise, then proceed to tell me the people didn’t own anything, not as such, that you can’t steal from a collective but only from individuals and that whatever my father had stolen was from individuals long dead. And most of it had probably come from governments, not individuals, when the Mule Lords had taken over. Then he told me that if my functionaries, who had been paid out of the same fund—like his family—weren’t giving everything back to the people, there was no reason I should. And when I tried to tell him that his father had told me I didn’t need to do this, not really, that it had been my idea, he said, “Mom and Dad have an amazing ability to make you have the ideas they want you to. Not that I have anything against them. They’re both honest, dedicated people. World’s worst parents, mind, but that’s because the great cause leaves so little room for it. But all the same, I’m not comfortable with this, Luce. I don’t like it. It’s your private property, and you shouldn’t be giving it to anyone.”

“I don’t need the property, Nat. I don’t want it. Once I’m . . . We’re going to have elections. Well, at least we will if things ever calm down enough and if it even looks like we’re winning the war. And then this palace will be for the elected representative of the people: president or leader, or whatever they want to call him. And I’ll move out. I’ll find some place to live. Don’t look like that. I’ll still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The poor women . . . Anyway, I’ve inherited enough that could only be mine. I was thinking of investing in a lot of robots and going and clearing some acres in the North American protectorate.”

He smiled at me. “Goldie will like that,” he said, and then, “I miss him.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “But what do you propose to do about Circum Terra?”

He looked at me. “Curiously, exactly what you said we should do. You have a knack. That’s why I thought you’re the face of the revolution, more or less accidentally, and perhaps we should let you actually run it, if we could ever unclench Dad’s and Mom’s hands from the tiller.”

“What do you mean what I said we should do? I said we should go to Circum. I was joking. We’d be shot out of the sky before we get there.”

“Not . . . precisely. I was talking to Simon today.”

He proceeded to reel off what sounded like a fantastic tale. Athena Hera Sinistra, Good Man Sinistra’s daughter and, as far as it was known, the only fertile woman bred from a Good Man anywhere in the universe, had come to Earth in search of the writings of the legendary Jarl Ingemar.

I hadn’t heard much about Jarl, because most of it was erased in the turmoils. It was as though the Good Men had a particularly vicious vendetta against him. Perhaps they did. If the story I got is right, he was one of those Mules who actually left Earth and made it to the stars in their starship. The ones left behind to die or claw their way back to the top as best they could would not be forgiving. Well, not if they were the lovely bunch I’d come to know as Good Men. But once upon a time Jarl Ingemar, who, as I understood it, was also a Mule, had been a well-known scientific genius, as famous for it as Einstein in his time. It is impossible to believe all the inventions attributed to him, from the power trees, those biological solar collectors in space that provide energy to all of the Earth, to some of the more sophisticated ways of bioengineering humans.

But Nat swore Jarl had existed and that, in fact, Athena Sinistra’s husband—born on a colony left behind by the Mules on their way to the stars, in a hollowed asteroid somewhere in our system, the people we know on Earth as the mythical Darkship Thieves—was a clone of Jarl’s, gene-modified to pilot the darkships. As someone who had always assumed darkship thieves were the harvesters’ way of fudging the accounts, I held my peace. I supposed she was a friend of Nat’s and if she’d married someone, it couldn’t be someone imaginary. I mean, I might have had Ben by my side for fourteen years, but I never expected him to be visible to others.

Anyway, for reasons that were even more nebulous but which sounded like the darkship colony was in as much trouble as Earth, Athena and her husband and some other girl, whom Nat dismissed with a wave of the hand and a mutter about her being a mechanical genius, had come to Earth in search of Jarl’s writings. And now they were going back to Circum Terra on their way home. “We can go with them,” Nat said. “They have a ship and they’re ready. And we can go aboard because it’s a short hop and there’s no problems with weight. They would appreciate the backup and we—”

Over a cup of coffee, which I’ll admit was much better than what I had ever made with the sock, he explained the idea. We’d provide reinforcement for them, and Zen, who was the girl who had come with them from Eden—the darkship colony—was apparently some type of communications genius and she had told Simon—who Nat thought, between the two of us and not for public consumption, was more than half gone on her—that she could rewire the communications stuff and also retrofit one of the ships left behind in Circum Terra—that part he never explained adequately—so they could go back to Eden.

Most of the details were beyond me, and those were the ones that sounded like they might be even remotely plausible, but what stayed behind in my mental map was that this meant Nat and I—and Simon and the Zen woman, whoever she was—were about to go and have a grand adventure.

The idea that I was going to be allowed to get out of Olympus and go do something, instead of recording mealy-mouthed broadcasts to keep the restive masses quiescent was enough to make me interested. But beyond that, Nat would be with me. There would be—for some days, at least—no perusing casualty lists, in living fear that the next name I read would be his. Better yet, I wouldn’t be wondering every time I sat down to dinner if he was starving. I wouldn’t be wondering when I lay in bed if he was sleeping rough, or worse, not sleeping at all, but in some desperate situation, fighting for his life. I looked at him, and I told him the absolute truth. “It sounds wonderful.”

The corners of his lips went up, and his eyes sparked with mischief. “Yep,” he said. “Lunatic. Certifiable. I tell you we’re going to invade and take over a well-defended place, in a desperate bid to change the tenor of this war, and that the chances are we’ll fail and if we fail we’re dead men, and you react like I just invited you to a Sunday school picnic.” He shook his head. “You have a screw loose, Luce, and you need a minder to make sure you don’t end up living with three pigs, one of whom wears an apron.”

A Few Good Men and
Not a Few Women

So we went to Circum. Okay, it wasn’t that easy. On the other hand perhaps it was. Going there was easy in itself. We went to this place in Central Europe, in the middle of the zone that got the same treatment as the North American continent. Okay, minus the nukes, but the difference was more academic than not. Bacteria had eaten everything and here there was, as yet, no regreening.

Nat said that was where the Mules were raised, after being created, but I think he got something wrong, because I’ve looked up the history of the place and it was a resort of some sort, until it was bought by the famous Jarl Ingemar and kept as a private sort of resort, where he could—I presume—hide out from the world, and perhaps from the fact that he would never feel like a normal human.

It was locked with genlock, and it had a bioshield on both entrances, and though I’d never trade it for the Longs’ farm, it was a wondrous area that various earthly paradises of legend could be based on: trees massive as houses, wildlife of a non-man-eating sort, fishes that leap into your hand, and a climate that was kept warm year-round. The only thing marring it was knowing it was artificial, a sort of playground for the very wealthy and eventually for the wealthiest man of his time.

Nat did manage to secure access to the genlock code. Don’t ask me how. I got the impression that Athena Hera Sinistra was very fond of him. We plan to go there, now and then, for privacy and rest. If we live long enough.