A Few Good Men (24 page)

“Yeah. You’re an innocent sometimes, you know that?”

“It’s the first time anyone called me that in at least fifteen years.”

“Yes, but your society has been rather limited for fourteen years, so that’s hardly a distinction.” He looked grave. “Come, Patrician. Have some food. Do it not to upset my father.”

“Will he be upset?” I asked, noting that Nat knew, at least, which levers to pull to get me to do something.

He shrugged and smoked intently, as if his life depended on it, before saying, “He’s worried about you. Worried about what you’ll think, after . . . worried about what you’ll decide to do.” Nat avoided my eyes very carefully, and I suddenly realized that he was worried too. And why shouldn’t he be? Let me see—so far I’d called the attention of the other Good Men to the fact that I was not my father, in a way that Nat could not hide; I’d exploded out of a meeting of the twelve in a way that might very well have endangered his life; and I’d been rude, obnoxious and hard-headed in a way that could have set the entire house against me.

I’m not saying his management of me had been that good, either, but then I suspected after what had happened with Max and after what he’d had to do, Nat was not, yet, in his right mind. Besides, in many ways his hand had been forced all along the line. And now he’d turned his back on me, and was setting a bowl full of something on the table.

“Eat with me,” I said. “And lock the door.”

He gave me a theatrical look. “Two dinners together, Patrician? People will talk.”

“Stop calling me Patrician. And the people who need to talk are the two of us.”

He hesitated. I could feel the joke forming in his mind, but I didn’t have the energy for this, not after what I’d just read. “I need someone to talk to about . . . what is in . . . what I’ve read. And . . . maybe I was an idiot to bolt out of the council—”

He crossed the room to lock the door.

“Have we been attacked again?” I asked. “The house, I mean. I’ve been so—”

“Buried in your own problems?” Nat said, charitably. “Go eat.”

“Nat! Have we been attacked?”

He stopped by the desk, cigarette in hand, very tense. I had a feeling of words carefully weighed. He shrugged deliberately. “Nothing worth mentioning. Go eat.”

I got up, feeling the aches of having sat far too long. The chair that had been set by the table was more straight-backed than my desk chair, but just sitting in a different position felt better. Turned out the bowl contained some broth. Nat didn’t make me invite him twice this time. He helped himself to a bowl of the broth, and sat across from me. Setting the porcelain box next to the plate, he proceeded to smoke and eat in a way I was sure was banned by all right-thinking etiquette experts.

“Where is Goldie?”

“He was playing with the boys, so I decided not to bring him,” he said, pushing the empty bowl away. “He needed the exercise.”

“The boys?”

“My brothers.”

“James?” I said, proud to remember.

He gave me an odd look, as though surprised I remembered. “James, Pat and Tom.” He went over to the serving board and looked it over. “Do you eat fish?”

“I eat anything. Well, I’ll balk at pink or green mush.”

“I imagine,” he said. Once more he filled a plate for me, as well as one for himself. I decided that there was really a lot of the nanny in Nathaniel Greene Remy.

“But you’re the oldest of seven.”

The briefest of smiles. “Debra is three. Are you really passionately curious about my family?”

“Is a large family a Usaian requirement?”

“I hope not,” Nat said. “Of course, I’ll probably die young. Now, what did I say. You’ve gone all white.”

“Don’t talk of dying young. Not . . . after what I read.”

“Yeah, don’t worry.” He set a plate in front of me, took another one for himself. “I’m not the type that dies young, more’s the pity. I’m the type they have to cut in half and bury each half at opposite ends of a river.”

“Banks?”

“Ends. Banks would be way too easy.” He ate and he started another cigarette. He smoked with the intentness other people reserved for things like making love or flying a broom through a narrow space, or avoiding a burner ray.

“Nat, what I’ve been reading, why?”

He looked up from his cigarette, at me, and didn’t ask me the obvious question, nor mock me, instead he said, “You mean why it happened?”

I nodded. “I don’t think . . .” I paused. “You’ll probably tell me that it’s epigenetic.”

“What the fatal tendency to not finish your sentences? Must be, never noticed it in Max or the old bastard. Not that I talked much to the old bastard. Not normally.”

“The . . . I’m supposedly his clone. If I . . . would I become like him?”

“What, trying to rule over twenty-five million people, Lucius? I expect you would, sooner or later.”

“Is that the population? I thought we only had a million or so.”

“Three million in the seacity proper, the rest in the . . . what do they call it? Aggregate territories. Your father . . . Your . . . whatever he was, claimed a lot of territory, as the blighted areas started getting colonized again.”

“How much control did he have over it?” I asked. I had a vague idea of vast expanses of space. Continents seemed alien to me, seacity born and bred, but of course they weren’t. Still, I had this vague idea that there was a lot of space to hide in a continent.

He shrugged. “For those people who live in the cities? Fairly tight. It’s more or less like living in a seacity. Now, did he hunt over every rock and ledge for stragglers? I don’t think so. I confess I didn’t ask him. There were other things on my mind when I questioned him.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

“Don’t apologize. Do you think I ever forget? Because it’s not brought up? Do you think I forget it for a minute asleep or awake?” He looked up, then gave something that might have been a repressed laugh or a hiccup. “And I just lost my right to lecture you about drama, didn’t I? Look at me calling attention to how special I am and how unbearable things have been for me. Never mind. My mom says she didn’t drop me on the head as a baby, but she’s probably forgotten. I did what I did because I thought I wanted revenge. I wanted revenge. But . . .” He shrugged. “Pardon me again. What you said, about what you’d do if you had that power? Probably. Look, the thing is, look at what I’ve done without that power.”

“I don’t know that you’ve done something wrong. I assume you needed to extract information, and he deserved to die.”

“Oh, it’s not what I did to him, Lucius. It’s what I did to me. Don’t you understand?” He looked up at me, and shook his head. “He deserved to die, I’ll grant you, and I never understood opposition to killing those who are causing death or pain to others—if the guilt is incontrovertible, that is. As you’ve had occasion to witness—sorry about that—I also don’t oppose killing in self-defense. But I should never have tortured him. No, wait. I should never have tortured him as I did, not in a way that . . .” He shook his head. “We needed the information, but there are drugs. And there’s always virtus.”

My face must have been a study in blankness.

“You can put someone in virtus and make them face their worst fears. I hear it’s very effective. I should have tried it. We did need to know where he’d hid Athena’s husband. But I went on, after that. And what I did . . . it diminished me. It might have killed part of me. And not just because he occupied Max’s body.” He looked at me intently, then sighed. “Look, I’m not a philosopher and I can’t put it any better than this, but my idea of myself doesn’t include torturing the helpless, and he was helpless at that point. Whatever else he might have been, he was helpless. Humans don’t do that. Humans don’t torture and kill helpless people.”

“You haven’t read what I’ve read. Humans do a lot of that, actually.”

“No,” he said, “you’re talking about humans as they exist. But humans . . . look, we’re not angels, we’re not perfect. Any regime that puts too much power in the hands of a single human assumes we’re perfect, flawless. We’re not, and given absolute power, the flaws will show. But we’re also better than the worst things we do. When you concentrate on . . . on the evil that men do, you miss what humans can be. No. What humans should be. And then . . . and then humans as such stop existing. Because we’re not . . .” His cigarette had burned down to his fingers, and he stubbed it, then examined his fingers. “You’re making me philosophize, but the thing is, we’re not, as humans, only what we do, but also what we dream ourselves. A free society can’t exist without humans imagining themselves as ideal creatures better than they are.”

I gave him a sidelong look. “Is this doctrine?”

“What? No. Just trying to explain why I feel as though I’m exiled from humanity by what I’ve done.”

“I think you’re exiled from humanity due to rampant insanity.”

“Ah, that wouldn’t do it, Lucius. At least half the people are crazy. What I meant to say, though, is that for a free society, we need some sort of moral standards, and moral standards are, by definition, a thing of the mind, not . . . not something you find in nature.”

“Wait,” I said. “Moral standards, like . . . who gets to sleep with whom, that sort of thing, or—” I dug in my mind for other things that had been considered morally iffy in the heyday of moral preening before the rule of the Good Men. “Having too many children, or too few?”

That time it was definitely a laugh. “Oh, sure. I am the one to be talking about any of that. I meant real morals. Don’t kill others. Don’t hurt others unless you have to do it to save yourself or a lot of other people. Don’t interfere with other people more than you have to. Treat other humans as . . . as that ideal human I was talking about, so you can treat yourself the same way.”

“We’re coming back around to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” I said. “Tell me, Mr. Remy, are you a missionary?”

“Only if you preface it with world’s worst,” he said. He lit another cigarette. “I’d give a go at being a honeypot, but I think I’d be the world’s worst at that too.”

“Quite,” I said, suddenly amused at his candor. Right now my idea that Ben had been forced into a relationship with me, or that Nat had been forced into a relationship with Max seemed odd. I’d seen real pain in Nat’s eyes when talking of Max. And as for Ben— I cut the thought short, because I didn’t need to think of Ben now. “The better brand of honeypot don’t leave cigarette burn holes on the sheets. What you’re telling me is, I suppose, that one has to act as though everyone has a divine right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, so that the right will exist?”

He was nodding vigorously. “And so that . . . well . . . That it will exist for us too. Your father—I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to call him—was only human in the purest sense in the end. No, I know he was a Mule, and that Mules are human. And that means he wasn’t perfect. Given unlimited power . . . he became what all humans become in that situation: a monster. Because, you see, the other humans, the ones he ruled, weren’t perfect either, so they didn’t obey orders, and he kept trying to make them be perfect. To whittle them into people who would follow orders. And that’s why you sense evil. He was denying other people the power he abrogated completely to himself. The power of self-determination.”

“So you’re telling me . . . That . . . ?”

“That despotic government is evil. It has a long record. It always ends in blood.”

“I thought that was what you believe because of your religion.”

“It is. But it also happens to be true.”

“I thought your religion promised you salvation from yourself, I mean, from . . .”

“All we’ve been promised is a land ruled by our principles, eventually.”

“For which the Sons of Liberty don’t intend to wait sitting?”

“God helps those who help themselves.”

I stared at him a long time. He smoked impassively, not seeming discomfited by my unwavering gaze. “Why did you take me to the twelve?” I asked. “What did you expect, if I’d agreed to become a . . . whatever you called it, an initiate in your religion?”

He rolled the smoke in his mouth and expelled a neat ring which climbed out of the light of the candles and into the darkness above. “I expected to be able to call the resources of the Sons of Liberty.”

“But you said they were not very organized. No, wait, Ben said that.”

His eyebrows went up. “I thought Uncle Benjamin hadn’t told you about the Sons of Liberty?”

“Well, not while alive.”

The eyebrows climbed higher. “I am not analyzing that,” he said. “Look, no, we’re not the most organized people around. There’s a joke. The individualists—”

“Failed to organize, yes.”

The eyebrows didn’t have any more to climb, so they just stayed pegged where they were. “Right. But in the end, some help is better than none, and we have some very experienced broomers in the ranks. And besides . . . Well, there are other organizations, in other seacities. We make a common front most of the time. There’s the Sans Culottes, Guy Fawkes’ Legion, Monster Hunters International, the Boys From Ipiranga, the Incarnate Legion and, oh, another dozen or so.” He shrugged. “In the end, perhaps very little, but Jan Rainer will stand with us, and perhaps, just perhaps we can start something. Perhaps . . .” For just a moment I got the impression he was tamping down his enthusiasm, trying not to appear as hopeful as he really was. “Perhaps there can be hope for freedom after all this time.”

It seemed like a forlorn hope. But then it all seemed like a forlorn hope. The question was did I want to go quietly into the good night, or did I want to go out as loudly as possible. I thought of those files I’d read, of the hundreds upon thousands of people the Good Men had killed over the centuries without anyone noticing. And that was without counting the people who had died because inventions that could have saved them were suppressed, because they or their inventors had been suppressed before they’d been disseminated. How do you measure a lost opportunity? How many drug-addicted broomers in the seedy parts of Liberte could have been space captains, had the present taken a different path—a path it could have taken but for intervention from above? How many people had died in engineered famines, who could have created an affordable space drive? How many of them could have birthed other geniuses that would grace us today?