A Few Good Men (33 page)

I was eating a sandwich—a surprisingly good one too—when the others straggled in. First Simon, who still managed to look as if he dressed to attract attention in a line of costumed dancers and who, somehow, had managed to go through the lowest dives around and emerge without a wrinkle on his ruffles. He’d grunted something that might have been
allo
or
allors.
I’d noticed his tendency to lapse into ancient French, which was nonsense. Liberte Seacity had, it is true, Gallic origins, but those had been from Francophone Swiss, and at any rate, the patois they spoke was no closer to real French than Glaish was to ancient English. The seacities were such a melting pot of languages and peoples who fled the catastrophic if slow-motion collapse of old Europe that hardly a single tongue escaped unchanged. I’d decided that for whatever reason Simon thought that French helped with his non-threatening image. And perhaps it did, a little, as he spoke it, since it was pantomime French or stage French—French as spoken in period dramas in which the French character was often either the evil seducer or the comic relief.

Martha and Jan stumbled in shortly after.

And then we talked. And it soon became obvious that we had all heard the same story. We’d had different sources, mind you, but the story was always roughly the same.

The problem became how much of it to trust.

“It’s not that it’s implausible,
allors
,” Simon said, leaning forward on a thin, tall stool that caused him to look much taller than Jan or Martha and about my height. “When you think about it, the sort of prison they use for the sort of petty drug infraction that gets most broomers arrested would be packed on any given day. So, if all the prisoners were sent out at once, the story would be everywhere. Particularly after the break into Never-Never got into the rumor mill, sparking a bunch of conversations about prisons and detention.”

“But would they just kick all the prisoners out?” Abigail said. “What we have to ask ourselves is, wouldn’t they consider it likely that knowledge of this event would be indeed everywhere at once, and that we’d come to know it? They know we have broomer connections.”

“Not the way I see it,” Martha said. “They’re laying a trap for Lucius, mostly. They don’t even know about the rest of us. And if the trap they’re laying is for Lucius, how are they to know he’d go bar crawling and gathering information? Hell, we’d not even thought of that till a few hours ago.”

“Okay, so maybe it almost makes sense,” Jan said. “But it’s the almost that bothers me. Wouldn’t they have seen the potential for us discovering where Nat was and finding a way in? If there is a way in.”

That part at least was different, as in, no one had told them about the way to escape Coffers, which of course, happened to make an excellent way in. That is, if we could figure out which freshers had been loosened so the bases could be pushed, and if we had any idea at all where the drains for the sewers ended.

We didn’t. But that wasn’t the hold up. The hold up was that none of us—not one—could be satisfied that this was real and not a trap. And walking into a trap tonight was on no one’s plans.

After a good two hours pointless discussion, Simon, who for some reason seemed to hold authority in this lair, broke up the discussion and told us to go to bed. I hesitated. “If I go back home,” I said. “There is a chance of being ambushed. Not high perhaps, but—”

“Oh, not home to bed,” Simon said. “To bed here.”

“He doesn’t have a bed here,” Martha pointed out.

“Surely we have accommodations for guests,
enfin
?”

“Well,” Abigail said. She seemed to hesitate minimally, then took heart, as if daring herself to do something. “Perhaps . . . I mean, if you don’t mind, Lucius, you can stay in Nat’s space. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, and it saves us having to figure out a place where you’re not likely to be walked in on by a drunken broomer or an amorous couple.”

I nodded. Nat’s space, whatever that was, would do fine. “I don’t like this,” I said, as Abigail drew me into the partitioned area. “I don’t like waiting. You don’t know what every hour in the sort of situation he might very well be in, can do to a man. You don’t—”

“I do,” she said. “And I don’t like it either. Except that of course you can’t expect us to go charging in to what might be a trap, either.”

“No,” I said, and was about to add that I could always do it alone, when a head popped out the blanket-hung door of the partition we were passing. He looked remarkably like the unlikely angel who’d freed me, and he said, “Ab’ga’l, wanna see a boom?”

Was that a flash of panic in Abigail’s face? She put a hand out and grabbed the other broomer’s arm, and said, “No, Fuse, you can’t make a boom in here. You know what Ma—what Simon would say to that, don’t you? It’s not safe, and he doesn’t like it when people get hurt.”

The creature addressed as Fuse blinked. “I wasn’t going to set off a boom,” he said, with the supercilious exactness of an aggrieved six-year-old. “Just to show it to you and tell you what it does.”

Abigail sighed and gestured for me to follow her. Inside was a small compartment, with a vast working table, covered in materials I couldn’t identify. Some of them smelled chemical, and some looked like they were made of strange, sparkly materials. When Fuse turned away, Abigail told me over her shoulder, in a loud whisper, “Don’t touch anything. Most of it will explode on contact.”

Now Fuse was turning back from the bench with a radiant smile, the sort of sweet smile he’d had when he broke me out of jail. “No, no,” he said. “It’s not like that. Not this new one.” He picked up what looked like a glass globe only slightly larger than a marble. “This one you can carry in your pocket for months. It won’t explode until you throw it with force, like this,” He lifted his hand, holding the marble, and Abigail was on her tiptoes, grabbing his hand with both of hers, so he couldn’t throw anything out of it. “No, no, Fuse. Not in here. You promised, remember?”

“Uh. Yeah,” Fuse said, and then started talking about chemicals and how he’d put a shell with a cushioned something or other on the globe, and how this meant it needed an impact above . . .

I zoned out, my mind spinning over the problem of how to figure out if the setup with Coffers was a trap or not. Again and again I wondered how we could know. And again and again I got that we couldn’t. Which didn’t make it any easier to accept. Nat still needed rescuing, but could I allow all these people to risk their lives in what might be an enterprise that would never succeed?

I had something like the glimmer of an idea, the sort of feeling one gets when there’s a solution to a problem, but it’s not appeared in words in your mind, yet, so all you have is a feeling. And then Abigail smiled at Fuse and said, “It is all very interesting Fuse. It is quite a lesson, isn’t it? And now, you know, we’ll have to go, but I’ll be back later to talk some more to you, okay?” To my surprise, she kissed him on the cheek. To my greater surprise, he made no movement to follow us.

Still, it wasn’t until we were a long way away that she said, “He’s perfectly good with explosives, you know? They work the way he says they work. He made the shaped charge that got us into Never-Never. The material shattered a little wrong, because he couldn’t be expected to know twenty-second century dimatough, but the rest, he got quite right.”

“But . . . he’s mentally deficient. Who taught him to work with explosives? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”

She gave me a very serious look. “He is the son of Good Man Mason, and he—” She sighed. “He had an accident going through the spider at the entrance, you know? He was running from his father’s guards because he . . . he had discovered something terrible.”

“I’ll hazard I know what was so terrible,” I said.

She nodded. “I thought you might, but I didn’t know what Nat or Dad had told you, and I certainly didn’t want to be the one to break the news to you.”

“I understand,” I said, as she pulled up a corner of a blanket separating a cube delimited by boxes and pieces of ceramite.

“This is Nat’s place, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you sleep in it for a few hours. Maybe with a clear head we can figure out what is best to be done about breaking him out?”

“I hope so,” I said. If my mind had been machinery, it would have had glue poured on its gears. That’s what it felt like, slow and submerged in something that kept pulling me in irrelevant directions, or stopping my thought completely.

“Me too,” she said. She went into the cubicle, and held the curtain up, so that I ducked in after her. “Light,” she said, and the lights in the area came on.

I was so surprised to find myself in what looked like a regular room in a well-to-do house, that I stopped cold.

Abigail let the curtain fall. “We have to find him, Lucius. We have to bring him back.”

And then she was gone.

The Man, Alone

The cubicle smelled like Nat. I hadn’t realized before that he even had a distinctive smell, but he clearly did, and it was all over this area: a hint of aftershave, a remainder of cigarette smoke, and something else, indefinable, and vaguely reminiscent of cinnamon.

There was a carpet on the floor. The bed—a double bed—had been carefully made and sported a heavy, embroidered bed cover, not the sort of scraps of blankets and worn-through wrappings you found around the lair. There was a trunk in a corner, a desk in the other, and there were pictures on the wall.

My wandering eyes stopped on the framed picture over the bed. It was in the same style as the picture of Max and Goldie, but the subject was quite different. I found myself staring at it, as I slowly absorbed the fact that the nude man depicted was not me, not even me at twenty. For one thing, back then, I’d never let my hair grow that long, so that it formed an almost leonine mane. When I was twenty, I wore my hair pretty much like Nat wore his, well cut and shaped to the head. The other thing is that the expression wasn’t mine. I didn’t think even in my youngest days I’d ever looked that . . . well . . . innocent. The other discrepancy I took to be artistic license, because after all, what artist wouldn’t increase a man’s endowment, even if both himself and his patron knew it was wrong.
Nonsense,
Ben said in my mind.
Looks accurate to me.
Which meant the part of my mind that played at being Ben had some . . . inflated ideas as well.

I was still looking at the picture, when I realized this one was signed, in the corner, and that the name on it was, unmistakably Nat Remy. I blinked. Nat. But he was a lawyer. It was like opening a door and finding a garden where you expected an office. Suddenly I had a glimpse of Nat, the older brother who had assumed the parenthood of his siblings, and yes, anyone who came in contact with his family, while his parents devoted themselves to his great cause.

I looked at the drawing, and it wasn’t simply that it was good. There are any number of good pieces of art that are mechanical, contrived and not alive. Nat was a good stylist, but that wasn’t just it, nor was it his trick of returning to an almost minimalist style at a time when holos could improve on and add visual richness to mere nature. That was also a trick of learning and of habit. Craft. Any reasonably good craftsman who was intelligent enough could have come up with that. No. What I was looking at here was of a different order. The drawing, sketchy though it was, showed in every line Nat’s feelings for Max, from the admiration of his physique to a protective tenderness. Someone who drew like that was someone for whom art was a passion, an overmastering drive that forced him to create, even if the drawing in public areas had to remain unsigned, because he wouldn’t want his father to suspect that Nat had any other interest but in working for the family’s cause and in helping his father with the management of the Keeva estates.

It made me want to laugh, then cry. The crying part came when I imagined how it must have felt when Not-Max, whom, at the time, Nat didn’t know wasn’t in fact Max, had asked him who had painted the portrait now in my room. And also because I wondered what else Nat didn’t bother talking to anyone about, and how much of himself he hid. I would guess a great deal.

I’d assumed his reserve and oddness was from having lost Max so recently, and from the circumstances of it. But now I wasn’t sure. Now I wondered if they were simply part of being Nat Remy, who always did what was expected of him, even if the doing almost broke him in two.

I turned the light off. I lay on the bed and tried to sleep. The bed smelled like Nat, too, though I’d only lain down atop the covers. By which I don’t mean that it smelled like it wasn’t washed, but more like a faint scent of Nat’s aftershave, and his cigarettes, and the undefinable smell that was him had stayed behind on the bedspread, from his spending so much time here.

I wondered why he would spend time here. For Nat to be a broomer at all seemed an odd thing. It was hardly the behavior of a dutiful son, the scion of a respectable family.

But then I suspected it had all started just like Ben and I had started at our lair. It was a place where you could go and be yourselves. Oh, not a place to have sex. That could be managed at home, or not too far, and in ultimate instance, a place could have been bought or procured. No, it was a place where other people knew of our relationship and accepted us as a couple. Broomers were many things, but it had never occurred to any broomer—not even the contrived upper-class broomers our friends were likely to be—to have any taboos on sex.

It occurred to me that it was funny. Most of the others viewed the lair as a place to go and have all the offbeat sex you chose to have, while people like myself and Ben, and I suspected Nat and Max, went to the lair to be monogamous and in all but our genders conventional.

What we cherished wasn’t the fact that no one would burst in on us while making love—which at any rate wasn’t true, since at least in our lair the sense of private space was a bit lacking and some people would not just approach but try to hold a conversation—but the fact that we could hold hands, or lean on each other. What was to other people a normal part of normal, public life, to us was the most rare of clandestine pleasures, and could only be purchased at the cost of becoming broomers.