A Few Good Men (45 page)

Which was just as well, because if I remembered my old French that meant without pants, and if people started running about my house without pants that would get around and give a very odd impression of me and my retainers. Probably destroy my usefulness as a propaganda weapon. And no, I was not sighing and wishing someone would do just that. Well, not in front of Sam or Betsy, anyway.

Apparently anything that had been brought into the family by one of the women my “father” had married and used as incubators was, of course, inherited by me. Which meant I still had considerably more money, jewels and propriety than I knew what to do with, and Sam was not about to let me donate any of it to the cause until “you understand more about money.” And when I’d bridled at that, I’d tamped it down quickly, because I realized he was right. My entire experience of life was based on being a child, who, by definition, used money but didn’t fully understand it, then being a prisoner whose most prized possession was a near-disposable reader. I didn’t understand money, didn’t know how to earn it, or what to do with it. Though in the back of my mind a vague project was forming of trading all of those trinkets, jewelry I never wore and property I’d never set foot in, for a few hundred acres in the North American backwoods, equipped with all the most sophisticated work robots money could buy. Maybe I’d even get three pigs and one would wear an apron. Or maybe Nat would let me have Goldie.

But the important part of that work, and of going through centuries of snarled accounts and determining which of that property was still extant and could be claimed and liquidated, was to get money to finance the revolution.

It’s something the history books rarely mention, among all the pomp, the blood and the glory, but revolutions and wars, like all human endeavors, run on money. There were troops that needed to be paid, however irregularly. They had to be fed too, and it turned out Nat was right, all our efforts for that had come to almost nothing. As our forces in the field grew, two seacities had experienced revolutions, the Good Men and, alas, their heirs having disappeared in mysterious circumstances and the seacities taken over by revolutionary committees.

I didn’t like that above half, since the revolutionaries sounded much like the people that had been ousted in Olympus, but Sam told me we couldn’t make sure the entire world was on the right path. Yes, we could look after Olympus and its territories. We could make sure here, at least, the principles were kept. But not all our allies in the fight were Usaians, and we needed them all. We couldn’t engage in internal squabbling while we took down the most dictatorial regime the world had ever known. He called them
fellow travelers
, a term I knew from reading about the beginnings of the communist religion, and told me that they would be welcome until the current enemy was put down. For now we needed as many allies as possible, to help liberate the Earth from the grip of the Good Men, and, more important, to help free people’s minds from the grasp of indoctrination.

The fighting had started in earnest, though one of the things I rarely had time to do was look through the news holos. I read about the action in Syracuse, one of our major losses. They were all losses, followed by a huge list of casualties, and after them I’d be required to give a speech to the people of Olympus because Sam was always afraid they’d rebel. Our grip on their loyalty was, to put it mildly, unsteady. So I’d have to get in front of the broadcasters and say empty, ridiculous things like that we’d killed more of them than they’d killed of us and that I wished we could sell them a victory at such a price again.

At that time, normally, we didn’t even have casualty lists, and in my mind were all the young men Nat and I had recruited to the fight, and their sisters, not a few of whom had streamed in after them. How many of them were dead by then? Was Nat even alive? I had no way of knowing.

A day or two after these engagements, I’d finally get to peruse the casualty lists, and read name on name in mute horror at the number of them, in mute relief when I didn’t find any name I knew well enough to feel it. When I didn’t find Nat’s name.

If the summer spent in the North American woods—I’d since found out it was not in the old USA territory, but near it, at the edge of what had once been the country of Canada—had been my golden summer, this was winter, in metaphor as well as reality. Life was hemmed-in with duty, places I had to be and things I had to do, most of them mechanical and uninteresting, and yet all of them tiring.

I think I’d have given up eating altogether—not difficult as my house was being run on a skeleton crew, and eventually by no one, almost every able-bodied person having joined the war effort. If I didn’t ask for food, I didn’t get it—but I was not allowed to starve. When Betsy had found out my idea of dinner was a sandwich I made myself and choked down with a glass of milk if there was any or water if there wasn’t, before collapsing on my bed at the end of the day, she’d let me know I had not just a standing invitation, but a standing order to join her family for dinner every night. They’d retained the nannies who looked after the children and who had now taken on the additional duty of cooking and cleaning. And Martha helped, though she rarely stayed for dinner. On those rare occasions, though, we talked, and I came to prize her company and her good sense.

And that, that hour or two a day spent in the company of the children—Betsy and Sam were more often than not absent and eating at their desks—might have been all that saved me from becoming . . . I don’t know what, but not good. An automaton going about tasks someone else set for him. But the children, even if they were much like Goldie—creatures that didn’t understand what was happening or what we were engaged in—came to look forward to having me at the table, the one adult they saw all day other than their nannies. I’d more often than not read them to sleep at night. The nannies thought it was very good of me and very patient. I found out that this was something Nat usually did, because Sam and Betsy had never been very good at making the time. And so, to me this duty became a rope to salvation, taking me out of my new cell and into a light of freedom of sorts. Because, see, though I was theoretically free, I had become an asset of the revolution and jealously guarded, and it seemed like my day was as sterile and hard-bound as my time in that cell. I did things because it was time to do them, and I couldn’t just leave and do something else. And I had nothing but the children to remind me of what this was all about.

The kids reminded me. I could imagine that what I was enduring was for them, so they would grow up free; so they wouldn’t ever have to spend decades in a cell for things they didn’t know they’d done wrong. So they’d live under the rule of law.

Besides, they seemed to like me, which, like Goldie’s affection for me, was reassurance that I’d not been born some sort of freak, some unlovable, terrible monster, cut off from humanity.

“Don’t be absurd,” Martha told me, one of the few nights when she’d come in for dinner and helped me put the children to bed, after watching in open-mouthed disbelief as I read to them and helped with their prayers—they being Sam’s and Betsy’s children, their nightly prayers were of course for the restoration of the republic, to which I’d added a prayer for the safe return of our soldiers, which might not be canonical, if we even had a canon, but which was my own plea for shorter casualty lists. And for Nat’s life.

Without the kids, I’d have been lost in the darkness I’d lived in for fourteen years and started thinking lovingly of cots dropping on my face, and of chewing through my own wrist. Though at least my new confinement had better opportunities for suicide. I could always have opened my veins in a warm bath. Only I couldn’t, because the children needed someone more than their distracted nannies, more than parents too busy with the revolution to be parents.

“Don’t be absurd. Of course you’re human. And I never saw anything more monstrous about you than about anyone else.” Then she’d looked at me, straight on, and said, “What have you been doing to yourself, Luce? What is chasing you down the dark corridors of your mind?”

I had no idea what she meant, feeling like she’d just used some line of poetry. Had to be. Only lines of poetry were that strange. Or perhaps the woman had an inconsequential mind, at odds with her solid and sensible exterior. Must have, because her next question was just as absurd. “Has Nat sent you a letter? They don’t let them call, did you know? Too easy for the communication to be traced and troops to be found.”

I shook my head and had the impression she was surprised, which was silly. Everyone seemed to imagine some kind of grand relationship between Nat and I, because we’d both lost lovers, and because, I suppose, we were the only ones of our inclinations most people knew. That wasn’t true, either. I’d found quite a few more among our people, amid my household, amid Betsy’s secretaries, for that matter. Like Royce, who improved on acquaintance though he’d never be one of my favorite people. But it was none of my business to expose other people’s secrets. And in a way they were right. Nat was the closest thing I had to a friend. The closest thing I’d had to a friend since Ben died, because Ben had been that too. I’d lost both, my best friend and my lover, when he’d died. And then I’d lost the illusion of his ghost in Coffers. I’d not seen him, not even in my mind, since then. When I tried to pin down his image in my memory, it shifted and changed, and I couldn’t remember his features exactly anymore.

“Well, mind you,” Martha said. “That man is the worst correspondent in the world, and the two letters he’s sent me were nothing but veiled instructions for me to be a good girl, make sure I eat and brush my teeth at bedtime. No, not that blatant, but that’s what it amounted to. But he did ask me to check on you.”

I knew as she said it that she was lying, and a little more ice accumulated over my life. She tried to explain to me why I was so important for the cause, why I was chained to transmitters of various kinds, sending transmissions to keep people in Olympus quiet, recording transmissions for our North American protectorates, recording messages for the troops in the field. “People are making a huge change, and even for those of us, and I’d say we’re no more than maybe a tenth of the population—Usaians I mean. There are more than that who want this change, but we’re the only ones who have looked forward to this day for centuries . . . anyway, even for us, it is difficult. It’s like . . . in the twenty-first century, when technology was changing the way people lived at such a fundamental level that people weren’t sure of anything. You can get irrational decisions and a sort of madness of the crowds then. We don’t need that, not while we’re engaged in the larger battle. So, we need to give them a minimum of security. They and their ancestors have been conditioned to look to the Good Men as being something special. And you’re one of them, but you’re one of us, too. You believe that it’s worth it, and that there’s something wonderful on the other end of this war. And they have seen that holo of you rescuing Nat—most of them have by now, even outside our ranks—and they know just how extraordinary you are and yet that you care enough for one of us, for someone who is just average, to go into a jail and bring him out, almost dying in the process. You’re a walking propaganda coup, Luce, and it’s no wonder Mother is working you into the ground. But I’ll have to talk to her, or she’ll work you under the ground.”

I told her not to. A pampered princeling I might be, but the last thing I needed was to have a woman more than a decade younger than me take up my defense as though I were a poor, lost creature. I’d be a man, I’d endure this. I’d prove Ben wasn’t wrong in his trust in me. And Nat too, if he trusted in me.

Coincidences are an odd thing. That night when I got to my room there were two folded sheets of paper on my bed. They were folded on themselves and wrapped with bands of the sort of ceramite that can be encoded with an address and a destination and be delivered by robots. It was one of the many things that had never been allowed into production by the old Good Men, perhaps because of the ability they allowed people to communicate without supervision. We’d put them in production, I’d found through Martha, to allow fighting men to communicate with people back home without risking the communications system which was still in the grip of the Good Men. Not that this was without supervision. Clearly these sheets had been clumsily removed from their address bands, read, censored and put back into the bands. I’d later on find out this was procedure. Sam had gone into a lecture about how this sort of temporary violation of the rights of expression was acceptable in the cause of greater freedom. I didn’t care. I cared slightly more for a very official-looking note folded into each of them, apologizing for the delay, because these two notes had been sealed into another band and gone to the family of another fighting man, and only directed to me by the correspondence office when that family pointed out their mistake.

How they’d found out who it had come from, much less whom it was supposed to go to was beyond me, unless it all hinged on a pattern of otherwise random seeming dots along the top of the sheet, because the notes—both of them—were short on anything personal or even full names.

The first one read in its entirety. “Dear Luce, I hope you’re well and they’re not working you too hard. They’re working us into premature old age here, but it’s good to be doing something, at last. Heard from the (censored band of liquid ink) and the idiot dog is doing well. Make sure (censored band) doesn’t enlist. (Long censored band) much too young. I hope you’re taking care of yourself. NGR.”

The second one said, “Dear Luce, Mother tells me you (long censored band) and that’s good. Thanks for looking after the littles. Mom and Dad mean well, but (long censored band). (Short censored band) Goldie (censored band) but they got the antivenom in time and he’s doing fine. Syracuse (censored band) not something I want to live through again. But at least wartime is good for (censored band) promotions. Stay well and safe. (Short censored band) NGR.”