A Few Good Men (28 page)

Softly, What Light

The tenth. I hadn’t been keeping up with the calendar as such, but I thought back to the day I’d escaped Never-Never, then counted. Three days from now.

A silence stretched. The newsman was talking about something else, I didn’t know what. My mind hadn’t moved on from those last words, that set execution date. Public execution. Well, that meant they had to keep him able to walk to the execution block, didn’t it? And in what way did they kill people these days, when they did it in public? It had to be pretty spectacular, I’d guess. After all, Nat had killed a Good Man. An example had to be made.

“Well,” I said. “And
that
is not going to happen.”

Abigail’s mind must have been running on the same track as mine, because she said, her voice wavering unsteadily, “That’s beheading, isn’t it? When it is in public? At least they have to keep him in good enough shape to walk to the block then, don’t they?”

“Not if it’s a holo,” Sam said, sounding very tired. “They can pan in to him in position. No one will ever know what’s not shown.”

His quiet certainty made me shudder. “He’s not dead yet,” I said. “He’s not dead yet, by damn, and we’re not giving him up while he’s alive.”

Sam looked up at me and swallowed hard, audible in the entire room. From the suspicious shine in his eyes, it was to control a desire to cry, and I wasn’t even going to blame him for it, but I also wasn’t going to let him tell me again that his son was personal but not important to the cause. And that was exactly what it sounded like he was pleading, when he said, “You were right and I was wrong. Both of you. He is alive. But this public execution on a set date . . . If ever there was a clearer trap laid. They know we know they’ll keep him alive till then. And they know that if we can’t find him before then, we’ll make a push to save him from death. We can’t do that. We can’t play into their hands.”

Abigail’s lip curled, and she really was reading my mind as well as echoing exactly what Ben would have said. It was enough to make a man believe in reincarnation. “You know what? They might know that. Let them. Which is worse? For us to play into their expectations of us, or for us to blatantly abandon one of our own in public? When we’re at the start of a good and hard fight, is it good to advertise to anyone in secret sympathy with us that we don’t stand by our own, and that in fact, if they’re caught, they can go hang for all we care? Is this what we want? Didn’t you tell me about the fall and how it all started with infighting among the friends of freedom, while the enemies of it were always one steady and resolute block, no matter what their dissension?”

“No,” Sam said. “But the thing is . . . I wonder why he didn’t . . .” He looked at me. “You see, he was . . . We all are, at a certain level, outfitted with a last friend—a painless way to commit suicide. I was sure he was dead, because he knows the secrets he’s possessed of, and what would happen to all of us if he betrayed us. He also knows that there is a level of torture no human can withstand without breaking and talking.”

“Why not?” I said. “Ben did. Did Ben . . . also have a last friend?”

Sam shook his head. “No. That’s when we started it, but . . .”

“But Ben surely didn’t reveal all he knew. I can’t believe my father would have kept you on staff if he’d known what you were. I can’t believe any of your family would have stayed alive, either.”

“No. But Ben had no other option, and Lucius, don’t you for a moment believe we don’t honor his sacrifice and his courage. He did give his life for freedom, even if his arrest and what happened after was not in the fight for the cause. He did keep quiet to his last breath. But this is a chancy thing. No one knows their pain threshold until it is brought to bear, and besides they use other things: hypnotics and virtus experiences, that can break the strongest man. It has nothing to do with physical endurance and all to do with mental stability.”

“And you think Nat is mentally unstable?” It was another of those moments where anyone else but the father who clearly loved him saying it would have met with a physical answer from my fists. But I knew he loved Nat. I also remembered Nat saying something about his differences and I, who had never been part of a family, had a vague glimmer of the barrier that could form between a grown father and son. There were things neither of these two proud, reserved men would tell the other even under threat of death. I suspected Max had been one of those things on Nat’s side, and clearly Ben’s history had been one of them on Sam’s side.

Did Sam think that by telling Nat about Ben’s relationship with me, he’d have encouraged Nat in a path that Sam clearly thought dangerous? Or did he just feel too awkward of the subject? Did they both feel it wasn’t the other’s business? And Nat, whose whole family—unless his mother was the most oblivious woman in the world—was involved in conspiracy and proscribed religion to their hair roots, wouldn’t share with his father the knowledge of a proscribed relationship, even though his father was quite aware of it.

The tangles of relationships between normal human males related to each other made me almost glad that I’d been born to the “father” I had, where there was no pretense of love or affection and no hope of acceptance, or even a modicum of caring between myself and my father. It would be worse, I thought, to care for people and not know how to tell them, or to care for them and fear as you see them careening down a dangerous path, and you’re helpless to stop them.

Then again, that was the devil of it, because—through Ben, or because Sam obviously cared for me too, or because Nat was the only person, in this new life of mine, with whom I could talk with no barriers and holding nothing back, or because Abigail was as close to Ben come again, as a human being could be—I cared for the Remys and they were involved with me and I with them. And our relationships didn’t bid to be any less tangled than any normal relationships just because I wasn’t related to them.

“Damn it,” I said. “Nat won’t break, but I don’t relish his being at their mercy a minute more than needed, and I don’t see why he should be. We should—”

Which is when the incredible happened again. A knock sounded upon the door. Look, I’ll be honest, in the circumstances I expected a buzz at Sam’s desk. The knock was a measure of how out of their minds my household was this morning. And then I thought of course they were. By now the news would have spread that Nat had been arrested.

Everyone from Sam’s secretary and my valet to the depths of the kitchen and the lowest potato peeler would know that Mr. Remy’s oldest son had been arrested for Max’s murder. They’d also have heard the story of how I was an impostor who had convinced Nat to do the murder. This made perfect sense for the other side to say, and it would make perfect sense to me if I were on the outside of our tight little cabal.

After all, what had I done the moment I got to the house? I’d spent a lot of time closeted with Nat Remy. What hadn’t I done? I hadn’t tried to go before the council of Good Men and make even a token effort to be examined as the Good Man. I assumed that papers had been filed with whatever legal mechanisms the council had at its disposal, demanding that they pardon me for Hans’s and Ben’s murders. But that would count for nothing if they could pin on me conspiracy for Max’s murder. If this stuck—and I was at a loss for why it wouldn’t—and if they did execute Nat three days from now, then I would follow him to that block as soon as they could capture me.

A wild bubble of laugh tried to break out through my lips, because the juxtaposition of their having kept me alive for so long when I would have gladly died, and now killing me when I wanted to live was so shocking. But though an inappropriate laugh tried to get through, I was strong enough to prevent it. I managed to do so, with only a hiccup, and, as I covered my mouth, I wondered how many of my household members were really Usaians. Because it was the only reason I could imagine for us to still be alive, still uncaptured. Anyone else would have believed what the news said and assumed that Sam must have rigged the genlock to react to me, and that I was an impostor. As the cook had said on the day I came in, they did amazing things with plastic surgery these days.

Then the knock sounded again, and I thought perhaps it had just taken them this long to rig out an arrest party with the bravest housemaids, the trainee guards and the pastry chef. I let my right hand drop into my pocket, to hold the box with the fragment of the flag. I let my left hand dip into my other pocket for the burner I had in there.

And, as Sam called out, “Yes?” I removed the safety and pointed the gun straight at the door.

In the circumstances, with me ready to fire through my trouser’s pocket at any intruder, the person who appeared as the door opened was a near anticlimactic shock, as she was Sam’s secretary, looking first around the room in alarm, and then at the floor, as she said, “Mr. Remy, Good Man Rainer and Good Man St. Cyr are here to see you.”

And it must have been that she was so overwhelmed by the visit of two Good Men that she didn’t find the rest of the people who were there to see Sam worth mentioning, because behind her I could glimpse Martha as well as a few men, clustering.

Sam looked up, then squinted at the amorphous group. “Right, let them through, Mary.”

She stepped aside, and the door was flung open, and suddenly the tiny office was much too full, and the door was shut, and everyone was speaking far, far too loudly.

I have never liked crowds, as my reaction to my first public birthday party should have proved. But there was more than that here. I’d been in solitary confinement for fourteen years. Solitary confinement is mainly known for its near-total absence of crowds. Which meant that there was nothing in my recent experience to prepare me to be pushed up against the wall of the room, while a bunch of angry men pushed in and up close to Sam.

I couldn’t even follow what they were saying. Their voices were just sound, washing over me, while my heart thudded hard enough to sound deafening in my ears, and my breath came in short panting breaths. I knew I was ten seconds from a real, physical panic attack. There were too many people, too many bodies, too much noise. And while, unlike Ben and Nat, I’m not a berserker and was at no danger of flipping around on the hinge of panic and going after the assembled crowd with fists or furniture, I was on the edge of crouching in a ball on the floor, sucking my thumb and peeing my pants. And it seemed to what remained of my rationality that this was not likely to make the case to the council of twelve—I was sure that was who these were, judging from the way Abigail had elbowed her way into the middle of it and was speaking forcefully into the midst of the din—that we should risk even the smallest outermost part of the cause to defend me or help me rescue Nat.

Very censorious are people,
Ben’s amused voice echoed in my mind’s ear.
Buck up, Luce. You have to keep your wits about you. Trust me, they’re going to be needed. The twelve are ultimately a committee, and one of the great founders of our faith said a committee was a life form with no brain and three or more stomachs. You can’t act the Hamlet now. Nat’s life might depend on this.

I took a deep breath and straightened. If it had been only my life, I’d have been tempted to let it go, and let it all slip free, and let it all go to hell at long last. But Nat deserved better from me. And besides, Ben would never let me live it down.

Look, it would be a fine thing for me if I were absolutely sure that there was no soul, no spirit, no life after death—just a random oscillation of electrical energies and biological whatchmacallits giving us all the impression that we had an individual consciousness and the ability to choose our own destiny and forge our own path. It would mean that I would never have to face Ben again, and his withering irony if I’d fallen even slightly short of his—exaggerated and impossible—vision of my goodness and my heroism. Yes, he had illusions about my looks and my strength too, but those I could do nothing about, and besides no one would hold it against me if I couldn’t keep that up. But the goodness and heroism thing? He would require from me an explanation as to why I hadn’t remained the hero he expected me to be. And what was I supposed to do? Spend eternity in a domestic squabble? I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I plan to spend even a weekend, much less forever.

So I took deep breaths to clear my head, and stood up straight, separating minimally from the wall. I became aware of Martha’s shrewd gaze trained on me, informing me that she, at least, had a fairly clear idea of how close I’d come to assuming the fetal position. Behind her, an arm around her middle, was a tall, fair man whose features were familiar, and whose expression showed the personality of a stranger.

He looked like Hans, only much taller and healthier looking. I was going to assume that whatever had made Hans unsuitable for the succession had also stunted his growth, because if both he and this young man were clones of the same man, then something had gone horribly wrong with Hans’s development. This man also looked like Good Man Rainer, of course. But his expression was like neither Hans’s worried frown, nor like his “father’s” smug and self-confident swagger. Instead, he had an open, direct gaze that reminded me of no one so much as Martha. I wondered if it was possible for people to come together out of a mutual attraction for reason and being too sensible for words. If it was possible, I didn’t know of a single case, either in real life or fiction. Normally people were attracted by mutual impetuousness or strange quirks of personality, not by good solid reason.

Jan looked a little concerned, as he stared at me, but not as much as Martha. Perhaps, even if they hadn’t really confided since twelve, Martha had heard more about the conditions of my captivity than Jan had.

A few steps from them, someone else was staring at me. He was, I gathered by dredging from my mind the memory of a similar but older face, the Good Man of Liberte Seacity. Small, dark, incredibly well-groomed, and wearing a ruffled shirt in tones of pale yellow, over form-fitting trousers of the darkest blue. I blinked and wondered if another Good Man’s house had developed the same “epigenetic” issues ours seemed to have.