A Few Good Men (29 page)

But then his eyes met mine, and I realized that the way this man dressed was part of a calculated effort to look gaudy and a bit silly. Because those eyes were at total variance with the clothes and the amiable expression on the rather regular features. They were all shrewd evaluation. I got the feeling he was evaluating my disposition to the last grain of sanity I could call upon and the extent of damage my captivity had done to me, to the last scar-whorl on my wrist.

And then I heard the sentence, “Once Lucius Keeva signs the papers to turn power over to the council.”

And I was out of my corner, fists bunched.

A Free Man

I dipped my hand in my pocket, and took hold of the flag in the box. Not to remove it. I had no intention of removing it this time, and I had no intention of leaving the organization. But, as my mind gathered the gist of what I’d only half-heard the last few minutes, I was ready to fight for it, and for me, and for the freedoms of the individual. And in that, I wanted as much of Ben’s help as I could have.

Yes, I was aware that Ben was dead, and had been dead a long time. Yes, I was aware, even then, that the voice in my head was no more than a harmless illusion, a contrivance I’d managed to keep myself from becoming a gibbering mess, unable to make sense of the world or my own mind. Yes, I was aware that there was no power, no virtue in that scrap of flag that could carry me through what was going to be a damn difficult argument.

I can only point out that however much I might be the clone of a bioengineered freak, designed by researchers and built by scientists to have capabilities and abilities far beyond that of the normal human—as well as, it would seem, a moral deficit miles wide—I was still made from human materials and still human shaped and therefore subject to all the human foibles.

From time immemorial—judging by very primitive graves found so far back that our ancestors weren’t even, themselves, quite human—humans have been holding on to objects and mementos of those who were in some measure heroes or revered. And from time immemorial, these relics were thought to confer some virtue upon those holding them. Does it matter if it was true or all a psychological effect? You leave me my psychological effects, and I’ll leave you yours.

I waded into the fray, my hand clutched so tightly on the box that contained Ben’s flag that it’s a wonder it didn’t shatter into a hundred pieces. I elbowed my way past sweaty, screaming men to the center of the roiling crowd, right beside Abigail. It wasn’t that hard, once I’d overcome my fear of being surrounded by humans on all sides. After all, I was six seven, and that does have some advantages to compensate for the disadvantage of being the best target in any given crowd. “The Good Man,” I shouted, as loudly as I could, “will do no such foolish thing.”

A sudden and complete silence fell, and in the silence Sam gave the sort of hiccup that was, almost certainly, the result of suppressing sudden and inappropriate laughter. I gave him an indulgent look. “And I bet Sam would explain to you why if you’d just let him talk.”

“Of course I can explain to them why,” Sam said. “You must relinquish some of your power to delegates who can deal with the preparations for war and . . . other things, but you should never give full powers to the council to do as they will with the seacity.”

And then there was a man, whose voice was distinctly familiar for having taunted Nat back when I’d been waiting in an antechamber with the light in my eyes. He advanced to the desk and pushed his face next to Sam’s and asked Sam if he meant to be a dictator and the power behind my throne, which would have been merely annoying if he hadn’t followed it up by muttering that Sam was as unstable as his damned son. Since I didn’t think that it was likely that this man had developed a vendetta against the thirteen-year-old James, or either of the younger boys, I had to assume that he was talking about Nat, and apparently so did Sam, who pushed back on his chair and said, “John, as the head of the twelve, I will not overstep the bounds of my authority and punch your lights out, but you will consider yourself punched.”

“I can punch him, Sam,” I offered willingly. “I am not one of the twelve, let alone the head.”

The man looked around, and stared at my fist, then looked back at Sam. “Oh, you’re not going to deny that he’s unstable, are you? Over the last year he’s been riding to commit suicide and taking the organization to hell with it.”

I believed it. I’d seen more than a bit of that wild despair. But I would not admit it. Not now. Not in front of Sam, and not while Nat was in need of the Sons of Liberty at his back. “Considering what has happened to him for the last year,” I said, “Nat Remy has to be more stable than most people, or he’d have gone howling into the night. And I fail to see where Nat’s stability or lack thereof has anything to do with why I should give dictatorial power to a council of ill-assorted persons of whose qualifications for the job I am wholly unaware.”

“I thought you said he’d become one of us?” a voice said from the back.

“If by that you mean I swore sacred allegiance to your religion,” I said, “I did. Which means all the powers of the government flows from the governed and that I will, in due course, relinquish any right to govern this seacity and its appertaining continental territories to an elected group whose election follows the rules they themselves set.”

“We’re elected,” another man said.

Abigail snorted. “Elected by about two hundred people in a militant group devoted to destabilizing the current system of governance is not the same thing as elected by the governed.”

“Precisely, Abigail,” I said. “I am not elected, but there are mechanisms for governance in place, and I promise to doing the minimum possible to keep the seacity and territories running until the representatives of the people are in place. It is less disruptive to keep the power structure in place while we elect the new one. To the measure of the possible, of course.”

“But we need to go through the seacity,” John said. “And the other seacities.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“There will be a lot of supporters of the Good Men in all three seacities,” he said. “We can’t afford to go into Liberte yet, of course, since St. Cyr”—he curled his lips disdainfully at the Good Man—“belongs to one of our allied groups, and they haven’t agreed yet to come out in the open or to let him come out in the open as being in rebellion against the system. But even there we should be able to do discreet sweeps and remove the most stubborn of the ancient regime and neutralize them.”

“John . . .” It was Sam and his voice sounded gentle and almost sweet. “John, what do you mean by neutralizing?”

“What? Kill them, of course. People’s trials and all that.”

“People’s trials? Do you mean we’ll kill them because they don’t believe in our religion and in our ideals?”

“What? What else? Of course we will. We can’t let the little power-mad weasels take over again; it will mean the republic will be built up only to fall again. You can’t—”

“Do you really mean,” Abigail said, “to have people killed for crimes of opinion?”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

“I don’t believe that’s a quote from one of ours,” Sam said.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” I said. “Though I fail to see how someone who has sworn to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of each individual can purport to be for summary executions of those who believe differently.”

“But we have to,” John said, and looked at me, with a slight frown, as though he thought I’d taken leave of my senses. “Surely you must see that. You can’t build a republic if some people still believe the Good Men have special power to rule over all.”

“What was the percentage of Americans who were patriots, or at least who fought for freedom, in the time of the American Revolution?” I asked the room at large.

“About a third,” Abigail said. “But to be honest there were reprisals against the loyalists, in some regions strong enough to devolve into door-to-door fighting.”

Yeah, she might very well be Ben’s reincarnation, if I believed in such things. Ben, too, had always felt compelled to be intellectually honest, even when it damaged the point he was trying to make. “Yes,” I said. “But it wasn’t terror from above, at the orders of people with dictatorial powers. If it comes to war, we might have door-to-door fighting, too. We will not, while I have any power to say so, have summary and arbitrary executions, on the basis that someone holds the wrong opinions. If it comes to that, I will die by their side, and I will hold that I died in defense of the principles of y—my religion.” Into the brief silence and while I could see John struggling to put a treasonous construction on my words, I said, “And what opinions would most of these people have? Even I, who had more reason to suspect the facade of stability, peace and order that the system has, had to be convinced by facts that the regime is infamous, and that a democratic republic, ordained by God or not, might be a horrible regime but it was the one that, in the full length of human experience, worked the best.”

“But we can’t have enemies in our midst, stabbing us in the back,” John protested.

“So we should instead enshrine attitudes inimical to our very founding principles?” I said.

I looked over at Sam. “Sam, I do realize I will need to sign some orders to secure the island, and that we might have to curtail the movements of some people, eventually. I also do realize that I’ll need to delegate some powers so we can get into a defensive state. But this is the governing council of the Sons of Liberty, not the governing council of the seacity, much less of the world. Right now, I’d think the Sons of Liberty would be more concerned with freeing the one of our own who is imprisoned. If not for his sake—and it should be for his sake—then for the sake of the secrets he might spill, which might endanger the rest of us.”

“He’s been outfitted with the means to seek quietus,” someone said. “Before he spills any secrets.”

“A fine thing, too,” I said, “if it is known that the only thing the Sons of Liberty do for their own is allow them to commit suicide. Has it ever occurred to you that this will not inspire a lot of confidence in your commitment to individual right to life?”

“It would be his decision,” someone else said.

“Yes,” I said, my voice ironical, and I wasn’t sure where these speeches were coming from—if from my panic in being in a crowded room, or from my idea of what Ben would say. “It would be the only decision we leave him. I’d like to point out, ladies and gentlemen, that if we go to war—and if you think the Good Men will cede power without war, you haven’t lived in the same world I have and you’re not part of the religion that believes it is one of the natural human flaws to crave more and more power—there will be a lot of us taken prisoner and tortured. Do you want people to think in that extremity death is their only friend? If not, I advise you to reconsider what you’d do to rescue Nathaniel Greene Remy, one of our own, taken because he is one of our own.”

“It was no part of our directive for him to kill Maximilian Keeva.”

“Really?” from Abigail. “Then what was the directive that we should kill all the Good Men we could if it would be beneficial to destabilization of the regime?” She seemed to remember belatedly that Jan and I were Good Men, and gave me a sideways look. “Except those of them who are with us, of course.”

I let it pass, and managed even a slight smile at her. I was sure they knew as well as I did why the older Good Men had to be killed and why their heirs shouldn’t.

“But we don’t have the armies,” a worried man, who had spoken very little said, from the back. “We simply don’t have the force to break anyone out of a maximum security prison. Even if we knew where he is, which we don’t. Even if we gathered every one of our trained men. We don’t have the equipment, we don’t have the numbers, we don’t—”

“Adam,” Sam said. “We do. We have enough for an operation of that kind, but, Lucius, we might not want to display it just yet, and bring this to a full-fledged civil war before we have time to turn public opinion at least somewhat in our favor. Part of the issue is that we don’t control communications and, by now, half the people in the world believe the version of events given by the holo cast. And you have to realize that if they dig into your histo—”

“I know,” I said. “I know. I’m sure if they actually believe I am who I say I am they’ll come to far more dire conclusions than if they thought I was an impostor. I think that should be our first priority. Communications.”

Sam chewed his lip. “It won’t be easy,” he said. “To do something about that. If, back in the twenty-second century they’d fought the oligopoly that banned expression and news reporting by average, unlicensed people, it was doable, but now . . . It’s been three hundred years since it’s been assumed that the government has a right to regulate speech and that something horrible, if unspecified, will happen should anyone try to allow everyone to access channels of mass communication. And the technology has developed to prevent it. Or not developed to allow it. Electronic communication is tightly controlled, dominated and supervised. You can’t simply send a message to everyone you know at once, not unless you want some people to ask pretty sharp questions, and our links don’t allow us to call more than one person at once, unless it’s an emergency broadcast link in a flyer, and those are only activated under distress conditions. The penalty for using it und—”

“Father,” Abigail said, sharply. “I think right now the penalty for being who we are is death. And I don’t mean just because of our religion, but because we know we’re in rebellion, or they will soon. And that means—”

“She’s right,” Martha said. “Right now we shouldn’t mind about the penalties for doing anything.”

“Eh, par dieu,” Simon said. “We need to form a group to study this. It is as this creature, the Good Man Keeva, says.” He gave me a look that a less careful observer would consider disturbing. “What we should be discussing right now is not how to alienate most of the people by punishing those who oppose us, but how to bring most of them to our side, because most of them have never heard of us. The purpose of the revolutionary groups, the Sons of Liberty and my own Sans Culottes should be to model good behavior and that . . . marvel of mutual care, civility and civic virtues that we think should be characteristic of a free society, no?” The name of his group caused me to do a triple-take on him, before dimly remembering it from the French Revolution in the nineteenth century—or was it the eighteenth? I had also a memory that they hadn’t been exactly nice people, but how much of that was true, and how much the accumulated propaganda-patina of centuries? “We should care for our own, and fight for those who can’t fight for themselves. And we should try to establish free communication, because without it, we do not reach the people. I’d say the fact that the flyers when they’re falling can communicate in broad range to everyone around should give us a clue on how to overcome the silence. Yes, the other devices are hobbled so you can’t communicate to more than one person. But those aren’t. And how many of them are moldering in junkyards? I suggest we form groups to study what to do and establish a priority agenda. And that . . .” He bowed slightly to me, a strangely anachronistic gesture. I wondered whether it was part of the culture of Liberte, because I didn’t remember his father ever doing anything like it, or if it was characteristic of his attempts to seem far more foolish than he was. “One of the principal points to discuss should be the rescue and freeing of Nathaniel . . . eh . . . Greene Remy.”