A Few Good Men (40 page)

TO WAR, TO WAR

Paradise Regained

For the next week and a half I came as close to my idea of paradise as I’m ever likely to be. I don’t know about you or anyone else, but when I die I’m going to a farm in a space cut out of a pine forest. There will be chickens and pigs and cows, unruly kids and, I’m afraid, Nat and Goldie too.

There will be Mrs. Mary Long too, as sweet a woman as I’d ever met. Perhaps not sweeter than my mother, but less reserved. Where my mother could and did withdraw into her grand dame persona and put even me at a distance, Mrs. Long never did. And her husband, and her whole warm, tolerant family.

I first met her that day when Nat was done telling me how important our mission was, because she came up the stairs. Nat shut up when he heard her steps on the stairs, but stubbed his cigarette and jumped up from the bed, when she said “knock knock” from the door, which was open. At first I had the impression he’d got up so she didn’t find him sitting on my bed, because perhaps she’d find it improper.

Then I realized he’d got up to help her, because I heard her say, “Why, thank you, Nat.”

Nat came into the room carrying a tray, which he set on a small table that seemed to be just behind my bed. I could see it by turning.

“It’s good to see you awake,” the lady said. She was plump, though not markedly overweight, probably a head and a half shorter than Nat, probably on the low side of fifty, with reddish hair, a lot of freckles and a ready smile. “I heard talking and since Nat doesn’t usually talk to himself I thought you might be awake and thought I’d bring you something light. The med tech said we were supposed to feed you as much as you’ll eat, so I’ll bring food up a lot. Don’t worry if you don’t feel like eating it all, we have pigs.” Then she seemed to realize we’d never even been introduced and extended her hand to me. “I’m Mary Long, by the way, and of course I know you’re Patrician Keeva.”

This was not something I was about to let go. “Not in the least,” I said. “I’m Lucius. I mean, you can call me
Mr. Keeva
if you insist, I don’t think I’ll keep the title much longer, but if you call Nat
Nat
and me
Mr. Keeva
I’m going to feel hurt and left out.”

She smiled and a dimple appeared. “Well, then. We can’t have that. Would probably delay your recovery. My husband will come up sometime to introduce himself.” She fussed with my bed clothes and adjusted my pillow. “If you want to sit up to eat, there are more pillows there, inside the window seat. Nat can fetch them.”

I wanted to say I wasn’t exactly an invalid but I suspected if I tried to sit on my own I’d do something humiliating like pass out, so I just smiled and thanked her. Nat must have suspected my embarrassment because he said, “Well, now, he can’t very well sit up as such. He’d ding his head on the ceiling.”

She smiled. “He probably would. We’re terrible hosts, aren’t we? But this was the only quiet guest room we had. The others are near the kids’ rooms. Mind you, I’m not saying you won’t get them all up here, sooner than later. Well, all except Jane, who is sixteen and thinks she’s too big for hero worship. But the others have heard. And . . . well . . .” She blushed. “They’re boys, now. And we’ve all seen the holo, of course. And the boys especially . . . Well, you know what boys are like with heroes. So, if they get too bothersome, just have Nat swat them and send them back down the stairs where they belong. But here is the only place away enough they won’t be on you all day long.”

Nat got the pillows and they arranged me half-sitting, and really, I thought Mrs. Long was going to kiss me on the forehead. The pillows smelled of herbs. Weirdly, as embarrassed as I was, I didn’t feel uncomfortable, not as such. Of course, I did have a few questions, but I was reserving those for when I was alone with Nat.

Mrs. Long’s idea of a light snack consisted of a good half loaf of bread, butter and something that Nat said was apple butter—it did taste like apples, at any rate—a pear sliced in neat quarters, as though she were afraid I’d not have the strength to bite into the whole thing, and a glass of milk. Fortunately I discovered I was ravenously hungry just smelling it, hungry enough to fight tiredness, and was trying to spread the apple butter stuff on a slice of bread, with marked lack of success due to my half-reclined posture, until Nat came over. “Here’s an idea,” he said. “Assembly line. I assemble the food, you convey it to face.”

Mrs. Long smiled and said, “I’ll leave you gentlemen then. If you need anything, don’t forget to holler. Dinner will be ready in an hour and a bit. Will you be coming down, Nat, or should I send up a tray for two?”

I opened my mouth to tell them I could eat alone, but Nat didn’t have his mouth full of bread and apple butter, and said, “A tray for two would be nice, Mrs. Long. I have to make sure he doesn’t fall asleep and drown in the soup or something.”

She was gone before I could protest. And when I managed, “Drown in the soup, really!” after she’d left, Nat just smiled and said, “You probably would, you know? You keep nodding off. I don’t think you’re even aware of it. And she’ll bring you enough soup to drown in.”

He’d buttered or apple-buttered all the slices of bread and now stepped away and lit a cigarette. I talked to his back, “Holo? What holo did they see?”

He turned around and did his best to show me two empty hands, in a gesture of non-aggression. It wasn’t quite right because a hand was holding a cigarette, but I’d give him A for effort. “Not my fault,” he said. “Security holo. I told them you wouldn’t like it, but Mother said . . .” He trailed off. “Well, never mind, but the thing is, she thought it would be good . . . well . . . for your image, and so she passed off copies into the auxiliary core with you know, do not for the love of heaven copy and distribute. I don’t think there’s a single Usaian household that doesn’t have at least a copy by now, and I’m sure a lot of other people do too.”

“Mother said?”

“I knew you wouldn’t let that go. You really have a rare ability to fasten on the one thing of all I most don’t want you to pay attention to.” He looked suddenly grave. “Look, you’re not a child, and you’re not stupid. You know that part of our work is turning people against the Good Men. We just don’t want you to get swallowed up in it, should . . . well, when things get ugly, all right? We want people to know you’re not like them and you’ve fought against them. Sorry if that meant violating your privacy a little, but we want it imprinted on the public consciousness, that all the bastards might deserve to die, except Lucius Keeva. Do you understand?”

I sighed. “I understand. I don’t have to like it, do I?”

He gave one of his cough-chuckles. “I don’t particularly like it. Remember, in this hero-holo, I got to play a slab of meat thrown over your shoulder, and the parts of me that were recognizably human aren’t parts I normally wish to flash in front of all the Daughters of the Revolution. But I do see the need for it.”

I was mulling over everything he said, while I ate and drank my milk. I didn’t remember drinking milk straight since I was about five, but this tasted good. All of it tasted good, making me feel, once more, I’d got somewhere beyond my normal state of life. “Are you afraid of new turmoils?” I said.

He shrugged. “Luce, I’m not a strategist. I’m barely a good underling with enough executive capacity to know how to minimally improve on or change orders. My father is the genius. But I think that it’s quite possible we’re trying to create turmoils. There is a great deal of fear of biogen and of the Mules. Strangely, the Good Men have used that fear to keep themselves in power. I think it might be related to their real loathing for their congeners who— Never mind. You don’t want my own explanations and rationalizations. Suffice it to say that it’s much easier to manipulate people based on their fears and their hatreds than on their reason and their desire for liberty. The Good Men have kept the Earth in miserable subjugation, but it’s been a predictable subjugation, where nothing much changes and where there’s a path to doing pretty well for yourself and your children, given a willingness to jump through hoops and some conformism. But for most people—unless they were at the wrong end of one of the engineered plagues or famines—it’s been a pretty comfortable life. Comfortable people don’t rebel.”

He got up, lit a cigarette and started pacing. I’d come to know Nat well enough to realize when he paced he was trying to reach some conclusion in his mind, trying to make sense of something. I started nibbling on the pear while he spoke. “It’s always been more uncomfortable for people like us, of course,” and then making it clear he wasn’t talking about just Usaians. “But then it’s always been more uncomfortable for people like us, except maybe in ancient Greece and places like that, though even there I wonder.” He paused. “And not just people like us in the sense that . . .” He floundered. I realized that Nat simply didn’t like to speak of private matters, not even to people he trusted. I also realized he trusted me, and felt a sudden warm glow about it. “In the sense that we are attracted to the same gender, and most people aren’t. I mean the regime of the Good Men, like most dictatorial regimes that rely—they have to—on controlled scarcity and controlled conformity, are hell for all the outliers the . . . the people who don’t quite fit in: eccentrics, oddities, people who think differently, people who are smarter or dumber than the rest.

“What has always puzzled me about history is that all those people, yeah, and people like us too, seem to support the tyrannies. Every tyranny that comes along.

“I think it’s because, at heart, we want to belong. All humans, I mean. And we oddlings think that in a dictatorship we’ll have to belong. People will be forced to accept us. But the thing is that any regime where power is centralized is a regime where conformity is enforced, any dictatorship, any government strong enough to enforce anything is a disaster for us. For all the odd people. We can be silenced, put out of the way, killed. That is always there, hanging over us. On the other hand, I think it is part of the attraction of dictatorships for . . . well . . . for people who are normal enough to fit into the designation of average.”

I almost choked on my bit of pear. I’ve said I am by nature paranoid, right? Not that paranoid. “Nat! That’s not true. Your father . . . I’m sure your father . . . I mean, he knew about Ben and me, and I don’t think he ever felt we should be put to death. And as for—”

“Oh, please. My father is no more average than we are, though his oddity is of a different kind. But I didn’t mean that average people want to kill those people they personally know who are . . . a little different. No. Most people will have some exception of the sort that goes
he’s a little funny, but he’s one of ours.
But that’s the thing, see, humans are by nature tribal. Blame what we come from, apes who, like you, had a tendency to overthink everything—” He gave me a challenging look, but I let it pass and he went on. “Awful materials to make us out of, and one wonders what God was thinking, only of course, perhaps it was the best choice, awful though it was. These are tribal creatures, creatures of the band. And we are too. And that means that anyone who sticks out too far hurts tribe cohesion and, unless linked to us pretty closely, arouses the need to stop them. I think the Good Men, not just by killing people like us and . . . other eccentrics, because they don’t kill enough of us to make a difference, but by forcing us to go underground and not show our strangeness, contribute to most people feeling safer, feeling better. That’s not the way to get a revolution going. But showing the Good Men are the very thing they taught everyone to hate will get the revol— Luce, for the love of heaven!”

I thought he’d gone crazy, then I realized, somehow, I had milk all over my face and he was wiping at it with a napkin that had been in the tray. I’d fallen against the milk, knocking the glass over, then landing my face in it. Without waking.

“Not drown in the soup,” he said. “You were about to drown in the milk.” Then, more contritely. “I’m sorry. I’ve been boring you into sleep.”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m just exhausted.”

“I know you are,” he said, still sounding guilty. He took the tray from my lap. “I’ll take this down, you rest.”

I think over the next week and a half that command was the thing I most heard from Nat, from Mrs. Long and from Mr. Long. I didn’t hear it from the kids, but that was only because none of the boys seemed to be able to speak in front of me. I’d wake up and they’d be gathered in a semicircle, staring at me as though I were a strange and wondrous object, and when I talked to them, I got open mouthed blank-eyed stares. Jane on the other hand, a more redheaded version of her mother and very pretty, would blush redder than her hair and more often than not hand me a cookie or a slice of cake—at a guess to keep me from talking to her.

But most of the time Nat and I were left to our own devices. Even Goldie deserted us, disappearing in the morning, and coming back at sunset, streaming mud or soaked in water or, on one occasion, covered in leaves and dirt. Nat would send him back down the stairs with “Not in that state, sir” then yell for one of the boys to wash him and dry him. Once, he’d explained to me, “He goes with the boys. Fishing or hunting or whatever they’re doing in late summer. He probably plays a hound of great valor or something like that in the kids’ games. And probably a pony for the younger ones.” And to what must have been my alarmed expression at the idea that the kids might abuse Goldie, he’d smiled. “Oh, I’ve never seen him this happy. I think we’ve been boring that dog, Luce.”

I don’t exactly know what Nat did during that time. I knew he was afraid to leave me alone, and much as I’d have liked to tell him he was wrong, the few times I’d tried to get up on my own in the first few days didn’t end well. Sometimes when I woke up from dozing, I found him using a reader. And one time, when he sat on my bed, smoking, his fingers were streaked with red and dark brown and green. In the confusion of trailing sleep, I’d reached for his fingers and made some sound of dismay, because I think I imagined he’d hurt himself. How that explained the green, I don’t know.