A Few Good Men (46 page)

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and I have no idea what the censors were thinking. For instance, what could there be in the fact that Goldie had got bit by a snake to make them carefully censor it? Not that Nat’s letters would have been much better without those. I had occasion to find out, he truly was the most dreadful correspondent, or, for that matter caller. When away from the person he was trying to talk to, he seemed to forget the human touch and yet feel he should have it, so his messages were an odd mix of straightforward information and attempts at showing some sort of emotion, which did not translate well in straightforward information mode.

Not that I was much better, as I found out when I tried to write to him, realizing that this was even possible and that I had, possibly, been remiss. As remiss as I thought he’d been.

My note to him, conscious that he probably had next to no privacy in whatever lodgings he had, and that this would be read by censors and by who knew who else, was “Dear Nat, Keeping busy. Much too busy, but never mind that. Didn’t realize I could write till Martha told me. Having dinner with your family every night, and reading to little ones.” Realized he must have known that from his last letter, but still felt I should reassure him. “Glad Goldie is all right. I miss him. I pray a lot before reading casualty lists. Don’t be on one of them.” I hesitated a long time over the closing, before writing, all in a rush and feeling terribly brave, “Yours, LDMK.”

I found out later that most of it, including my moment of foolhardy and rather timid daring had been carefully covered in censorship ink.

But the letters showed that, while under fire and under peril of death, Nat had thought of me as much as he thought of Martha. It gave me heart.

Perhaps I’d come across as truly pathetic, because Martha, Jan and Simon started including me in their war councils, which I suppose is what passed for parties these days. Their councils were about as boring as Sam’s and Betsy’s talks, but sometimes there was wine to go with the boredom. And I wasn’t sure what was going on with Jan and Martha. Martha said it was all very complicated because Jan felt he couldn’t marry her, because he could never give her children and also because he didn’t know what was going on with his position nor how it would end up.

This conversation was on my terrace, outside my room, overlooking the ocean. Part of the good side of being at war is that the seacity was no longer under particular attack. The battle lines had moved a little far off and we weren’t nearly as affected, so the terrace was safe. We’d come back from one of our meetings—the problem we were trying to get around being how Simon could declare the revolution in his own island without bringing retribution on himself. Right now, he was useful to us, since he could get us news from inside the Good Men councils, and provide us with advance knowledge. Not that he was fully trusted. In fact the only reason he was still alive was that his father was technically still alive and I guessed the old guard hoped their friend would come back. Which was part of the reason that Simon acted like an idiot—so he could look inoffensive enough that they didn’t try to kill him, as they’d tried to kill me even before I was in open rebellion. He too improved on acquaintance, which didn’t help us decide what the right moment was for him to pivot between playing the fool to being truly the man in charge there and declaring
la revolution
, which is how he referred to it, for
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
.

I’d tried to argue the last two had no business being imposed from above, but Martha had made frantic shushing motions, and I’d shushed. And now, she was sitting on the terrace wall, and talking about her relationship with Jan, and revealing far more feeling than I’d ever seen her even allude to. “Maybe I should take up smoking like Nat,” she said. Then gave me an odd smile. “Or maybe Nat and I will eventually lose patience and drown you and Jan, like a litter of misbegotten kittens.” She’d grinned. “You should see your face, Luce. I’m joking.”

Still I cared enough to reel back on my heels when the next battle report came in. Maybe it was to be expected. So far our people had escaped, had survived in some number to fight another day because the other seacities had failed to organize enough to come down on them like a united force. This was partly because Good Men were no better at working together than any other wild and solitary animal. They had their small groups, their alliances. But uniting the whole might of the forty-five or forty or however many of them were left was an impossible task.

Or had been, until a couple more seacities turned and killed their Good Men. And then they, or most of them, had brought . . . not armies . . . strike forces. Exterminators, as it were, falling upon each infected place, each focus of infection, and cleaning out our grand army in the same way as they’d once exterminated rogue broomers. And seemingly with no more effort.

The casualty lists went for days, and you could read them, pages and pages and pages of them. I read them till my eyes ached, till they felt dry and gritty and hot. It was difficult because many of them weren’t even in alphabetical order. Through them I found out about Liam’s death and Tommy Long, the Long’s oldest son, and of Jane Long, too. Through them I found out that there had been attacks on areas of North America thought to be hotbeds of rebellion.

Nat’s name I didn’t find at all. But I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t just accidentally skipped it, so I kept reading again and again to verify.

A Grand Expedition

I woke up with the door to the tunnel opening, and I was sure I was dreaming. I sat up and said, “Light,” and caught Nat in the glare of it, dazed, blinking, looking at me as if he didn’t recognize me.

He was wearing a uniform. We’d started having those, partly to give the units cohesion, partly because there were so many seacities fighting and it helped to know which seacity you were with. Olympus had—I had very little to say to this, and I suspect, honestly, it was Royce’s idea—a sky-blue uniform, with a mountain peak for a patch, shown at sleeve and chest. It clearly came in the two army sizes I’d read joked about since the twentieth century: too large and too small. Tradition, I suppose, since there was no reason for this at a time when we could have printed the uniform to the measures of each soldier.

Nat’s uniform managed to be both, hanging off him in folds and leaving his ankles and wrists uncovered. Though part of the reason for the folds was revealed in those ankles and wrists, both looking like there wasn’t a spare ounce of meat, let alone fat on them. His face too had gone much as it had looked when I’d first met him, under the grief of Max’s discovered death and the horror of what he’d done to Max’s body: all harsh planes and sharp, pointy angles, and circles under his eyes that made them look even darker and for once completely opaque. I have no idea what he’d done for haircuts. I was fairly sure he hadn’t taken garden pruning shears to his own head, and yet that’s what it looked like with long swipes of hair cut almost to the scalp, and long strands that overhung one ear and fell into his eyes. Beard inhibitor cream must be one of the things that they were running low on, because the light glinted on blond hair all over his face. His lips looked chapped. There was a patch of something dark and greasy across his forehead, and he appeared to be dead on his feet. I could smell him from where I was: sweat and something that stank chemical and burnt.

But he was alive and that was better than I’d ever expected. I was off the bed before he’d stopped blinking at me. I unbuckled the holster slung across his middle. He was not, I think, fully rational, because he tried to hold on to it, before I pulled it off and said, “No, Nat. You’re home. If someone comes in, it’s my job to shoot them.”

He didn’t smile, but he nodded, and he let me take the holster and the other holster from around his waist. I wanted to drag him into the fresher. I wanted to get him food. I wanted to have him home, to look after him, but I guessed what he needed the most was bed. And as short on personnel as my house was, and as much as there might be no one to wash those sheets in the next month, I dragged him to the bed and told him to lie down. I only had to say it once. I think he was asleep before he was fully horizontal. Screw the sheets. I’d burn them.

He slept for almost forty-eight hours, playing havoc with my schedule, though my schedule was in a shambles too, since Betsy didn’t know what I should tell people. Or to whom I was telling it. Our news was patchy because the Good Men had at last cut us out of the broadcasting network, so that we weren’t even getting their propaganda. Simon told me at least one of the cities that had rebelled had fallen and the Good Men had put everyone, man, woman, child to death. Whether true or not, rumor of it spreading to the other cities was solidifying Good Men rule. The two broadcasts I made were meant to keep the people in Olympus from rushing my house and killing us all. Not that I even knew if there had been any rebellion. Because other than those two broadcasts, I spent the time in my quarters, keeping an eye on Nat. I wasn’t sure how much he was like himself. I wasn’t sure who would wake up when his long sleep was over.

These things are always timed precisely to be their most inconvenient, and of course Nat woke up while I was away, recording the second broadcast. I came back to my room to find he’d got up and changed the bed and made it. The contaminated sheets were in a pile by the window, because he clearly had no idea what to do with them.

As I opened my door, he came out of the fresher, in a cloud of steam, wearing my robe. It was big, and fluffy and white, and it made Nat look even paler and more washed out. Also, he’d used the beard remover. His hair still looked frightful, I supposed, but it was soaking wet and he had combed it back.

And after two days of sleeping, the smile he gave me was still exhausted, as though he’d been running and running for days, and had just managed to stop. “Sorry, Luce,” he said. “I have no idea why I came here instead of my house. But when I woke, I couldn’t stand my own smell, so I figured I’d wash before going home to change. Sorry about the sheets and I’m afraid I made a total mess of your fresher, cleaning up. I have no idea how to clean it either.”

“Nonsense,” I told him. “You are home. And you’re welcome to dirty my fresher or burn my sheets any time you want to,” and before he could look at me like I was nuts, I added, “Let me make you something to eat.” I started towards the door, and he followed me, barefoot and wrapped in that ridiculously large robe.

The one thing the kitchens at Keeva House weren’t meant to be was cozy or family like. They also hadn’t been designed to be easy to use. The room itself was cavernous and probably could have housed ten families, just by itself. It was also full of specialized appliances and complex machines designed to extrude pasta or make pastry or other things I had never learned to do. Frankly, the machines scared me a little. I’d never even learned to use an automated cooker. Instead, I’d defaulted to cooking as I’d seen Mrs. Long do it. I’d asked her for recipes and she’d sent me a gem by courier, with news of Goldie, too.

Most of the time what I made myself consisted of either sandwiches or bits of cow imperfectly seared. But I’d tried a few of the recipes, nothing too complex. And since Nat had just woken up, I figured breakfast—which I was quite capable of having for every meal I wasn’t dragged to Remy house to eat—would do. So I broke eggs into a bowl, scrambled them and started frying them, at the same time as I brought out a pile of bacon to cook over a griddle, leaving a corner of it for pancakes, which were close to the top of the achievements of my culinary art.

While I was turning the last pancake, I found Nat at my elbow, looking at me with an unholy sort of amusement shining through the horror and the tiredness in his eyes.

But he said nothing, and I put the eggs and bacon in one platter, the pancakes in another, set them on the little table nearby, that I think had been a work table for the pastry cook, got a clean plate and silverware and ducked into the even more cavernous pantry for a bottle of syrup. When I emerged, Nat had set another plate, across from his.

I said, “I’m not really hungry. I had dinner at your parents’ house.”

He said, “Don’t make me eat alone.” The words crossed in the air, and he won. I got a spoonful of eggs and two strips of bacon. Truth was I had eaten. But the last two days were the first I remembered eating in weeks, because before that when I tried to eat I kept thinking of everyone who would never eat again. And, if I must admit it, worrying about Nat and whether he was dead or alive.

Then I realized I hadn’t given him anything to drink, and got up and made coffee, which, in my gleaming kitchen, designed to cook and serve banquets for hundreds of people, I made by straining boiling water through a—clean, thank you—sock, filled with coffee grounds. As I put the cup in front of him, he was looking up, and the unholy amusement was back in his eyes.

“I never learned to use the implements,” I said. “I don’t even know what makes coffee, and I’m afraid if I turn it on, robots will come out of the wall, grab me and roast me with an apple in my mouth.” I was rewarded with a shadow of a smile and continued, but couldn’t help getting more serious. “And I don’t want to use the energy. We’re being strangled on powerpods.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. It was a problem for us too, though . . .” He shook his head. He ate. I ate, and looked at him. He was still fourteen years younger than I, but no one would believe it. I wanted to ask him if he’d given up and if we must now prepare for an onslaught on the seacity, and how we could prepare. I wanted to ask him what had happened, and what had sent him back home, dirty, tired, starved and half dead. I wanted to ask him a thousand questions, and I could ask none of them. So I sat and nibbled at my food and watched him eat quantities that would scare a large contingent of teenagers.

After he was done, he nursed the coffee, looking at me. I pretended to be very busy with my quarter strip of bacon, trying not to ask questions.

“It’s not bad coffee,” he told me at last. “Quite passable. But the unit for the coffee maker is tiny and probably still has enough charge. Remind me to teach you to use it later. It’s the same we used at home.”