A Few Good Men (39 page)

“Yes,” Nat said. He inhaled and exhaled, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was really dead, and perhaps I’d gotten better than I deserved, because I could imagine paradise like this, in this pine-roofed room that sloped in both directions from the center, lying on a soft bed, with Goldie by my side, watching Nat smoke.

Then I remembered I didn’t want Goldie to be dead, and Nat said, “I saw the holo. I even understand all the justifications you gave and, by the way, you’re the only man I know who, delirious, wounded and with babble juice, paused to give explanations and figure out rationalizations, while telling the events he’s been asked to tell. Abigail was right. You’re a one-man debate society.” He smiled, which took the sting off the pronouncement, then he said, “It’s just that none of that explains why my father is sure that Uncle Benjamin took over for you, when you passed out aboard that flyer. He says you told him I was dead and Abigail was dead, and then he heard my uncle, and my uncle told him to . . . well, all the things you said my uncle told you to say. My father swears it wasn’t you. He swears it was Ben’s voice, and that the last thing he said was that same message you were desperate to deliver to us—that he’d look after Abigail.” He frowned a little. “I hope it is right. I mean, if there is life after death, and I’m not sure either way, but the chances are good that girl will need minding. She was very young and had a talent for getting in trouble.”

I heard the grief in his voice, and all I could do was reach over and touch the hand that didn’t hold the cigarette. His skin felt soft and was no longer nicotine stained. New fingers. He wasn’t wearing his ring. I remembered he’d said they’d taken it. “I’m sorry I didn’t recover Max’s rin—your ring. You told me it was missing.”

He gave me a fleeting smile. “I remember. I thought you were Max, you know? I had the foolish notion he’d come for me when I died, and I hoped that was it. And I was missing quite a lot more than my ring.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t seem to have compromised much though. Oh, I don’t have the resistance you Good Men have, apparently,” he said. “But it didn’t take much more than a few reshufflings of meeting places and operations to keep everyone safe. And I never told them about Dad or the others in your household.” He made a face. “I might have told them you’d converted.”

“That figures,” I said. “But that’s fine. Even if I can’t ever go back to my position. When I said life, fortune and sacred honor, I meant it.”

He nodded. “Oh, you’ll go back. You need to. But for now, we’re on the North American continent, at the edge of the repopulated areas. We’re staying with a family of our people, and we are on special assignment while we recover and stay out of the way of the big boys and their planning.”

I don’t know how long I took to ask more. I think I fell asleep momentarily, but maybe I just rested and got my wind back. I felt incredibly tired, which made perfect sense in my mind, because in my mind it had only been minutes since I’d driven that flyer out of Coffers, with Nat lying on a pile of sheets, and—to my mind—as good as dead, while Ben called the shots. It was so vivid and so recent that it was a relief to open my eyes and see Nat sitting there, perfectly alive, and whole and hale, smoking his cigarette. Later, a medtech explained to me that the type of tiredness I felt the first week or so after I woke up was an effect of the regen itself. He threw in a lot of strange words, and I can’t swear to you what it was all about, though I’m almost sure he mentioned prions. To this day I don’t know if that was related or a side excursion of the type learned men throw in to remind us—or perhaps themselves—that they know what they’re talking about. Whatever it was, the liver apparently has trouble processing the . . . by-products of regen. And in my case the whole thing was complicated by having to have special adjustments made to the regen. In any case, for a week and a bit I got a good idea of what it would be to be a hundred or so and senile, unable to hold a thought in my head for more than a few seconds and not having the wind to carry on a coherent conversation.

Nat was awfully patient with me. When I opened my eyes again, he was petting Goldie who, still cuddled next to me, had turned around to put his head on Nat’s lap. He grinned at me and narrowed his eyes, causing wrinkles to form in the corners. “The special assignment, before you ask, is for us to canvass the farms and settlers around here and sound them out. Well, not really around here, because around here the Longs know everything there is to know and they can very well tell us how their neighbors lean, though we probably still should talk to them ourselves. People like to be asked, and not have their contribution taken for granted.”

I raised my eyebrows, but he must have known how low on breath I was because he didn’t give me time to ask, and said, “War supplies. Well . . . food and clothing. And young people who want to volunteer, of course. We might even get some of those, though at a guess they’ll want to form their own band. They’re stubborn bastards out here. Have cut ties with most administrative structures and grow most of their raw materials and buy what they need to process them. You’d be amazed how independent one can be when one is willing to use suppressed inventions. Not that anyone is looking this far out, of course. They’re also oddly tolerant.” His eyes got a faraway look, as if he were thinking something through. “You can be and do whatever you want, provided you hold to decency in treatment of others.”

“We’re supposed to ask them for food and clothing?” I asked. It seemed daft. I remembered my own stores at the house, filled to bursting with so much stuff that even when we were under siege I could have a whole wardrobe made. And then, if it were needed we would have the stuff that never got thrown away in that house. Food, I supposed could be harder, but the three seacities in rebellion had plenty of ocean floor space. And while the improved algae which could give us everything a man needed to survive, and took a lot of processing before being palatable, they were edible and they were easy to grow.

Nat looked incredibly amused. I can’t explain it, but he had a way of laughing at me when I said or showed I thought something foolish that should have rubbed me wrong, but didn’t. It wasn’t so much like he was laughing at me, but like he was laughing at my idea, with the complete understanding that he, too, might think the same thing if he had followed the same course of gathering knowledge. What I mean is that he didn’t find my ideas stupid, and he didn’t think I was deficient in understanding, that much was clear. What he thought was that it was very amusing how a rational person could be so wrong. “How big do you think this war will be, Luce?” he asked.

I said, “Well, three seacities against the rest. We don’t have a chance, do we?”

He grinned. “It’s not that bad. Yeah, three seacities, as far as territorial areas go, and we’re sure now that Simon will throw in with us. It was touch and go for a while. Simon is . . . slippery. He can’t help it. It has saved his life for too long.” He stubbed his cigarette and lit another. “The Sans Culottes have a different program, you know. Different beliefs. And I suspect eventually, after the revolution and the war, there will be a fight between our two sides. Maybe not in our lifetime, but it’s inevitable. It’s happened in the past, many times, under many different names.” He stubbed his cigarette and lit another one. At least he wasn’t lighting them one from the end of the other, although I wasn’t sure it was that much different. “But the thing is that the administrative areas aren’t all that important. This will be a war not over territory but over ideas. There are many factions that have been against the rule of the Good Men for a long time. There are . . . Well, people like us and the Sans Culottes, and then are more . . . traditional religions. We’re not a traditional religion, you know that, right?”

I blinked at him. “I wasn’t raised with much of any religion, so— All you asked me as if I believed in the . . . principles, and that I can believe in. I always felt as though there was . . . someone, but I won’t guess who or what.”

He grinned. “Well, we’re not. We don’t even require that you believe in God, just that you believe in the principles we hold holy. And you can believe in another religion at the same time. Within our ranks there are people like myself and my parents who believe in God and are almost absolutely convinced there is a life after death. There are people who not only believe in life after death, but who think they can describe to you the color shoes you’ll need to walk on the clouds. Those are the ones that tend to believe in the prophecy that George Washington will come back, the chosen one, in some manifestation which will precipitate the revolution and lead us all back to the land of plenty. And there’s a lot of people who don’t believe in God but believe in the principles, and believe, once the principles are set in motion the outcome is as inevitable as if God had preordained it. We rub along together very tolerably, as we did, if you believe the texts, in the old USA before it fell. We hold strong opinions on freedom of belief, freedom of expression, the right to self-defense, right to private property and others. All coming from the first principles we swear to. If you consider that we have a concept of sin, a sin is to violate one of those, unless of course it is absolutely needed for survival. But other than that, we really don’t have an idea of sin. And we withhold opinions on matters such as who should sleep with whom, what type of underwear one should wear, how many children are a proper number, the use of intoxicating substances, the use of money and most dietary rules.”

“Most?”

He nodded. “I think so. Never asked, but I’m fairly sure cannibalism is frowned upon. It’s not good for you, and it would upset my mother, which is as close to a concept of sin as I was raised with.”

It occurred to me I was being amused. Or that he was trying to amuse me. “But Nat, will it be war? Will it be war for sure?”

“Oh, yes. Inevitable. There have already been a few . . . dustups, but for now things are very tightly balanced and our people are trying to hold the lid on it. Not too much provocation, not too much push. We’re letting them think there are very few of us, perhaps just a bunch of broomers—the dustups have all been with broomers so far—and that we’ll be easy to put down and they don’t need to be in a hurry to do it. It might be the only thing keeping the full war from erupting. And meanwhile we’re stocking madly and making an inventory of everything and everyone we can count on. Because as soon as the war starts, there will be revolutions in some seacities. Other places, like most of the administrative territories, will go into full rebellion. Or declare themselves independent. Part of it is to give the Good Men so many places to scratch that they won’t have hands to cover them all.”

I looked balefully at him. “I suppose I’m no longer a Good Man?” I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad. Ben’s dig about pampered princelings still hurt. Even if Ben had been no more than a figment of my imagination. Or had he been more? Look, I don’t claim to know what Man is made of. I don’t claim to know what comes next. I just found no Ben where Ben used to be, and figment of my mind or not, I was going to miss his accustomed presence. Perhaps I didn’t need him anymore—whether I’d created him or not, to begin with.

He shrugged. “I think you are. I think technically the seacity is still yours. I confess I only know what’s happening there when I come across a holo report, and in this area that’s nowhere near every day. But I assume if there is something important, Mom or one of the others will tell me. Last I heard, the entire family was trying to convince James he’s too young to join officially. I believe Mom has him analyzing semantic data or other make-work, just to keep him quiet.” He frowned at his cigarette as if it had offended him personally. “I think once it comes to shooting we’re going to have a heck of a time holding the line at sixteen years of age. It seems to be part of the species that very young men want to fight, and I don’t know how to prevent them. I don’t think anyone does. I’ve told my father to start teaching the brat, or he’ll go in half-prepared and get himself killed.” He must have read my expression because he sighed. “I’m sorry. I forgot it is still very recent to you. I miss Abigail. I probably will always miss her and I will probably always mourn her, but it’s been four months and the wound is no longer raw. I . . . None of us holds it against you, in any way. We all knew her all too well.

“Look, Luce, they didn’t send us out just on rest and recreation. Yes, I’m sure my father pulled some strings to get us sent here, instead of a lot less comfortable places. It’s a place we often send our wounded, and the Longs have their lives so arranged they’ll never be suspected or looked at askance, so we’re safe here. For one, they have a hundred and fifty acres and are in the middle of it, where they can control who even comes near. And don’t be deceived by the log cabin and the quilt. Yeah, they’re real, and they were made of local materials, but the trees were cut down by robots, and the cotton on the quilt is spun by robots too. They’re an odd mix of ancient and ultra modern, more modern than the Good Men have allowed us to have. And they are very kind to us, and they gave the two of us the entire attic,” He pointed with a cigarette. “My bed is on the other side, the bathroom, with fresher and water is there, desks over there, with readers and writers and probably holo viewers, though I haven’t looked for those. There is a curtain in between our sides of the room, and if you need help getting up even when it is closed feel free to holler. I don’t think you’ll be much use to anyone, including yourself, for about a week or two. Don’t look outraged. I went through the same when I first came here, and let me tell you, having a motherly stranger—because Mrs. Long is motherly and she was then a complete stranger to me—help you to the bathroom is something else again.

“Anyway, after you’re better I’d like you to join me in my sweeps, which I’ll be doing and will resume when you can come with me. I’ve been doing them alone, on my broom, flying out to the newly resettled areas, in the middle of the forest, talking to the people I find, sounding them out, then back a few days later, and my dad hates it like poison, because anything could happen to me. Most of the people out here are good people and most of them are decent, but remember when I told you my religion didn’t believe in human perfection? Yeah, not even here. So there have been a couple of sticky situations. And that’s not counting what nature can throw at you out here. So . . . You’re needed and we’ll put you to work as soon as you’re able. For now your job is to rest, eat—please, they feed me about ten times what I can eat, and I could use someone to take some of the load off me; I’ll never lose the weight I’m putting on—and become yourself again. As soon as you can, we have work to do.”