“Listen, Sam,” I said, “I was never noted for my social graces in my private life, and being alone for fourteen years hasn’t improved me.”
His eyes widened in alarm, and I hastened to add, “So, I’ll just say it. There are times . . . I mean, of course I get lonely like everyone else, but—” His eyes widened more. “BUT,” I emphasized, “I want to make sure you understand that I have no intentions towards any of your family. No . . . I know you know . . . I mean . . . Ben and I . . .” I floundered. “But I have no intentions towards anyone in your household. Romantic or otherwise. I was very young, with Ben, see. I think it would have ended badly anyway. Not as badly as it did end, but our different positions—that is, I don’t think—”
His mouth dropped open. He closed it with a snap. His fingers pinched and massaged the bridge of his nose on either side, the same gesture I’d seen Nat make. “Ah, hell,” he said, softly. “Good Ma— Ah . . . Luce. I’m not ready to deal with what might have been. As for your assurance . . .” He seemed at a loss for words, then snapped his mouth shut again. “Go have lunch. Go down to the dining room. Give the cooks a reason for existing.” He must have seen my intention of protesting, because he held up a hand. “No, listen. It’s important that they see you’re having lunch and . . . and following a routine. It will show them you’re not scared and . . . and all that. Just do it, will you?”
I did it. Sometimes, there are things that are not worth arguing, and Sam’s determination that I should eat was one of them.
So I sat in the vast, dimly lit dining room and ate my dinner off fine porcelain plates, and tried to get at least three bites of each of the dishes. At a guess there were fifteen of them, but who was I to count? None of them was salty or sweet mush, it’s all I can tell you. And I knew for a fact that at the end of my meal, all the leftovers were eaten in the servant lounge, so I didn’t feel I had to clean my plate. Which was good, because I didn’t think I could, short of exploding.
As soon as I could, I got up. I had to, because otherwise I felt as though they’d keep feeding me. The service stopped when I got up, but two of the servers were caught holding serving trays. I bobbed my head at them and said, “Thank you.” And beat a hasty retreat.
I’d eaten in the dining room before, but only with my father, and usually at a state dinner. I suspected there must be hand signals or something to control the flow of the service. I’d have to ask Sam Remy. I had a feeling before the week was over he’d think me a complete fool.
Cloak and Dragged
I beat a retreat to my room. It had been miraculously restored to my childhood retreat, even to the computer on the desk and the gems lying about it. On the bed, in the middle of the white bedspread was the stuffed giraffe that Ben had given me for my twenty-first birthday, as part of an elaborate joke involving my wish for a pet. It was four feet tall, with its legs folded under it, and it wore a collar with a tag that said I Wanna Be Loved By You. I blinked at it, and for a moment the world spun on its moorings and I was twenty-two again, and I wondered if it had all been a bad dream. But the voice that spoke from the vicinity of my closet, saying, “Is this all right? It was all packed together, so we assumed—” was definitely female.
I spun around. The young woman was older than Abigail, and shorter, and plumper, but had a definite air of family that identified her as belonging to Sam Remy. She also had the no-nonsense sort of look that made it seem like she’d be comfortable to be around, and a lot less high-strung than either of her siblings. Only her eyes reminded me of Ben—did the whole family have the same damn eyes?—even if hers crinkled at the corners and seemed disposed to look in amusement at the world.
At least I hadn’t drawn a burner on her. “Martha?” I asked.
She smiled and extended a cool little hand that got lost in mine when I shook it. A greeting of equals, nothing like the stiff head-bob I expected from a retainer. But I was starting to suspect the entire Remy family had very odd ideas when it came to equality and command. Except maybe Sam, who seemed to think I should be in full control of my domains.
“Lucius, right? Funny, you don’t look a thing like Nat said.”
“Uh?”
“Like an unredeemable bastard,” She said, and grinned. “You don’t look like one.”
“I—uh—”
“If it helps, I think he meant it as a compliment.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I think.”
She laughed at that—or perhaps it was something between a giggle and a laugh—and looked me up and down again, making me feel profoundly uncomfortable, for some reason I couldn’t even understand. And then she lied. “You don’t look a thing like your family. I think—” She looked at the watch-ring on the middle finger of her right hand. “Would you mind closing and locking the door? Nat will be here any minute.”
I closed the door. Listen, at some point you do. If the entire world around you has gone crazy, it is considerably easier to fit in than to stick out like a sore thumb. Safer too.
I’d no more closed the door to my room, and slipped the lock to locked—even though I didn’t even want to imagine what Sam would think if he realized I’d locked myself in a room with one of his daughters—than my wall opened up. Oh, I know it was a door. Of course it was a door. But even after it opened, I couldn’t have distinguished it in the wall. I wondered who’d done the work, and how they’d managed to make the door meet the wall so flawlessly and how they’d dug a tunnel through dimatough.
Nat came in. He was wearing a broomer suit, with the broom clipped to his belt. Weirdly, since I knew how he’d spent the night, he looked more rested than he’d been before. I felt a brief pang of disappointment that he didn’t have Goldie with him, as he came in and looked at me like I was completely out of script, then turned on his twin and frowned, then looked back at me and frowned harder.
“She told me to lock the door,” I said, defensively.
He pulled the ashtray-box out of my desk drawer, pulled a cigarette from somewhere inside a broomer suit that didn’t have any obvious pockets, lit it. “You’re both supposed to be in suits. What are you doing?”
I was about to tell him I was in a suit, when I realized he meant a broomer suit. Martha made an exasperated sound, and dove for a bag near my closet. She was wearing the same sort of tunic and pants affair that Nat wore, in the same greyish black. In fact, were it not for their different sizes, I’d assume the three siblings shared clothes.
I wasn’t even surprised—had lost my capacity for surprise, I guess—as Martha pulled a black, insulated broomer suit on, then clipped the broom to her belt. I decided that there could be no secrets here, so I went through the sequence to open my secret suit-storage place. And then I realized I really had no secrets, since the suit in there was new and, when I put it on, my size.
Either something in my expression gave my misgivings away or Martha was a mind reader. “Nat told me to put it in there. I’m sorry. Was I not supposed to know where that compartment was? Nat and Max and I discovered it, when we were little, playing around in the room. I put it there when no one else could see.”
I clipped a broom to my belt. Nat finished his cigarette and started a new one. He finished that one, as I pulled the boots on over the suit—the proper way to do it while broom riding—and inspected my new goggles and oxygen equipment. Then I followed Nat and Martha into the tunnel open in my wall.
“Watch,” Nat said. “You might need it.” He showed me a point on the wall that looked like slightly scratched plaster, then where to touch to get the door to close. “Most of it is a natural bubble in the dimatough,” Nat said. “Max and I found it beach-side due to an accident with a burner, and then we thought . . .”
We walked down what looked like an interior corridor in a house, and then dropped down an antigrav well, concealed in what looked like the ceiling of a natural cavern. Then along that to another antigrav well. The wells were of the sort you had to activate, and choose the direction on, and Nat showed m
e both points, one on each floor. Finally we walked through what looked like a very natural—and dank—cavern, to a door that closed and opened through as elaborate a sequence as the compartment in my ceiling, and then out a beach-side cavern onto the beach.
Yes, Olympus Seacity is a built seacity, made of shaped dimatough. But it was one of the first built, four hundred years ago. Either the caverns had been built in, or they’d been worn into the side of the isle by tides and time. No. This cavern was made of stone, not dimatough. Perhaps the island had been poured on top of a set of islets. It wasn’t an unusual anchoring method. And it meant some of the islets had become seaside beaches with natural caverns. And natural white sand, which crunched under my feet, as I followed Nat and Martha.
“Is it quite safe?” I asked. “We’ve been ambushed before.”
Nat gave me a look. “Safe enough,” he said. “We have patrols. I think they’ve decided on different tactics.”
“Like?”
“Like home invasion. You know hand signals, right? Wait, of course you do,” he added, clearly remembering the midair fight. He nodded. “Follow me. Martha can take the back.”
“I can take the back,” I said, and they both looked at me, twin frowns of disapproval and what I sensed was barely controlled eye rolling, like I was too dumb to live.
“No, see,” Martha said, softly. “You’re the target, not us.”
“Yeah, if we were sane we wouldn’t be taking you to this meeting personally. Mind you, sane is not something I’ve been accused of recently,” Nat said.
Martha gave him the briefest concerned glance, then said, “No. See. We have to take him with us or they . . . the others won’t—”
“Yeah, I know,” Nat said. “So. Ready?”
I wondered about their organizational skills. I mean, if they were taking me to a meeting at a secret location, would they really want to take me this way? Where I could see where I was going? Maybe they thought that the years in captivity had dulled my sense of direction and that I didn’t know we were headed for Syracuse Seacity.
No, wait. They couldn’t think that. Nat, at least, knew that I was conversant enough with directions to go see my old friends.
It wasn’t until we got close enough to our destination that I understood why they didn’t care if I knew the direction I was going, or even that secret meetings were held there. Our destination was a secret in plain sight.
There is this part of Syracuse Seacity, once a thriving industrial neighborhood. It is called Deep Under because it is. If you remember that Syracuse has grown in levels, one new platform, on pillars, built on top of the others, blocking out at least partially both sunlight and fresh air, it won’t surprise you that Deep Under is on the bottom level, so deeply ensconced in the shadow of the upper levels that it might as well be buried underground. Everyone knew it was there, of course, but, as with bad weather, no one did anything about it. And part of the reason for that was a huge, decaying multi-armed piece of machinery that blocked almost the entire entrance to Deep Under. At least, the best-known entrance.
It had, once upon a time, been a mechanical device that unloaded ships. I didn’t know exactly when, though I’d assume it was in the twenty-first or twenty-second century, when the seacities were first built. It had the look and feel of that era, the flexible arms, metal combined with various ceramics, before ceramite and dimatough, both more durable, cheaper and more flexible than any previous materials. Modern machinery would not decay like this, with the ceramic coating falling off and the metal arms falling to pieces.
The cybernetic brain that had controlled the whole mess had decayed long before the arms, and when air transport had become so cheap that few ships plied trade anymore, the entire harbor had been abandoned. It would have been more expensive to dismantle the robot arms than to keep them in place.
The decaying robot allowed entry to broomers and to foot traffic, but none to the larger transports or law enforcement-type vehicles that could go in and “clean up the area” as the news called for with amazing regularity, since that pocket of lawlessness was said to be inhabited by every forbidden group from broomers to Usaians to prostitutes.
I think the first time I’d flown there, I’d been attracted by rumors of very specialized brothels. I’d never found them. Truth be told, I’d never looked very hard. It seemed to me an odd thing to pay for that sort of service, something I’d never quite considered a good use of money. Instead, I’d been distracted by cheap gadgets and a strangely free-flowing culture.
Flying past that obstacle was the very first test that any broomer had to face in Deep Under. First, because there were far more arms than eight. I’d guess more like eight hundred, perhaps more.
Some of the metal parts rusted and fell apart—and did so at unpredictable times, so that flying through it you could set off a storm of falling ceramic and metal pieces as the vibrations of your passing disintegrated the metal that linked them. Even when they didn’t fall apart they had a tendency to move with the vibrations of anything near.
Was there a way to get through it? Well, yes. It involved flying with threading-the-needle accuracy through the open spaces between arms, while doing it at a controlled speed, so that it wouldn’t set off too many vibrations. Even so, it was a chancy thing. Nine times out of ten, the arms would still move a little, and even the most careful of broomers could end up being unlucky.
I didn’t mind that part. There is no life without risk, and we’ve all been dying from the moment we were born. Chances were getting one of those hunks of metal falling on you would kill you instantly. There were worse ways to die.
But I was out of practice, and I resented being made to fly in, when I knew there were other ways to get in—secret tunnels and passages people used every day. Then I realized that landing anywhere else in Syracuse was bound to attract attention and it would be easy enough for someone to follow us through one of the land passages.
Still, my body clenched in a tight knot, starting when Nat flew in between the arms, barely making the whole mess vibrate, and making it all look easy.
I followed at a different location. Look, no matter how much you tried, there would be some wind of your passage, and there was no reason at all to go through where someone had just gone through. That was just playing with fate. I aimed for and flew between the arms at the very top, taking a quick zigzag to the right then left again, as I realized there was a secondary arm back there, where I hadn’t seen it before.
As I landed on the other side, Nat was waiting, standing in the middle of a street that led into what could only be called a permanent around-the-clock bazaar. He’d pulled back the hood of his broomer suit, and taken down goggles and mask. As I landed near him, he lifted his eyebrows and said the one word, “Show-off.”
I realized he thought I’d gone through a difficult area to show my prowess on broomback, and that he didn’t entirely disapprove. I could have enlightened him, but Martha landed with a sort of bounce, as though she had too much energy to be contained by suit and broom. She pulled back her hood, stowed goggles and mask in a pocket, and smiled at us. “Ready?”
Nat grunted something that might have been assent.
Deep Under is blocked at the other end by a water desalination plant. Two of the other ways to enter it are person-width openings between it and the columns that supported Syracuse’s hanging gardens, a massive park directly above.
There were other entrances too, in the alleys between the buildings at the end of each block. But those alleys were really narrow and often blocked by loading docks. What was left, under there, were eight blocks of large buildings and one main street, most of it in complete darkness or as near it as could be, until someone turned on a lamp. All of it was protected by being inaccessible to most conventional peace keeping forces. Scrubbers could get in, I supposed, but I suspected they’d only be effective if they came in disguised.
Since this area supported illegal politics and illegal religion and illegal e
verything else, I suspected any Scrubbers coming in would be swallowed by the area itself. Most residents went armed and were fanatic about self-defense. And there were ways of making people disappear in Deep Under in ways they’d never be found.
So Deep Under was a secret everyone knew, but which no one official tried to investigate too closely.
There would be, I suspected, ways to deal with it. I’d heard, periodically, as my father’s friends talked of blocking all entrances and pouring the whole area full of dimatough. But it never happened.
And part of this was that Deep Under carried on vital economic functions. More factories existed in this cramped little space than anywhere in the known seacities. Down here designer, and nominally illegal, drug compounds were created. Electronics were made cheaper and in greater quantities than anywhere else. And you could buy and sell anything—including, I’d heard, illegal bioengineering.
It was one of those areas even Good Men needed now and then. Enough to tolerate its existence, unless of course it became an open bed of sedition.
It was populous too, all out of proportion with other places. Kids played on the street in masses, most of them wearing headbands with lights on the forehead.
And all around there were tents and counters, bins and walking peddlers, carrying baskets and hawking their wares. Nor was there anything rational about their arrangement. Some of the vendors had fruits or produce, but the next one might have electronics, and others other things that I couldn’t even identify.
Nat’s bright blond hair helped, because since he was wearing all black, he’d otherwise be hard to see in the semipermanent twilight. He walked ahead, dodging carts and peddlers, playing children and the occasional dog. He seemed to know where he was going.
Martha folded her arm into mine. I felt her warm hand curve in. I didn’t resist it, but neither did I make it easier for her. No use giving her ideas. Not that I thought she had ideas. The touch had a feeling of helpfulness, and after a moment I realized that three people walking single file following each other were far more noticeable than a man walking purposely ahead, who might or might not be followed by an ambling, strolling couple.
A Few Good Men Page 15
