But Nat had brought me here and submitted me to the judgment of the twelve. And he’d said they could protect me. And he was hell on a broom, good with a burner, and he’d killed Ma—my father.
Nat shoved me into the corner, put his hand on my chest, as though to hold me in place, glared at me. Before he could open his mouth, I said, “Benjamin Franklin Remy, right?”
It caught him off balance. His hand pulled back a little. “What?”
“His full name was Benjamin Franklin Remy, wasn’t it? And he never told me. He never told me, not even as he was dying.”
Nat blinked, his black eyes which normally showed nothing, looked momentarily stricken. “He couldn’t tell you,” he said. “He’d sworn an oath. The only way to leave is to die, and if he’d broken his oath, he’d have died anyway.”
I swallowed hard. I felt as if I had a fever. It was like a headache without a headache, a pain I couldn’t feel physically but felt nonetheless. “He died anyway,” I said. As I clenched my fists. “He died anyway.” I clutched onto anger. I wanted to be angry, because if I weren’t I was going to start to cry, and I suspected if I started to cry, I’d never stop. “And he never told me.” I swallowed hard. “He never told me he was in the Sons of Liberty.”
Nat took a step back, and looked up at me, and for once his expression was readable. He looked confused, and also oddly guilty, and naked and vulnerable. He’d not have looked more vulnerable if I were holding a knife to his throat.
“And you’re with the Sons of Liberty too,” I said. I pointed at the door. “Your sister Abigail is in the council of the twelve. How can she be? How can you let her? She’s what? Twenty? She’s a child.”
“We can swear oaths at sixteen,” he said, and swallowed. “And Abigail was elected. Look, the Sons of Liberty are not what you think, we—”
“How do you know what I think?”
“We’re not what the news say. No, we don’t believe in taking everything lying down, but we have rules and councils and deci—”
“Don’t care, Nathaniel Greene Remy. Don’t give me soft talk. I’ve had enough of that and more. You’re in an armed insurrection. Your whole family is part of it and—”
“Not my whole family,” he said, hurriedly. “Not all of them. My parents, and my other siblings might believe in Usaian principles, but they—”
I snorted. “Don’t care. Just tell me what you want of me. Why have you brought me here? What do you want of me?”
Nat brought out his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, shook it to start it, as he put the case back. His hand shook. “I want to protect you,” he said, and sucked in smoke as if his life depended on it, while he stared up at me in a mixture of fear and something else I couldn’t quite define. Why was he afraid of me? “I want to keep you alive,” he said. “And there’s only one way to do that and that’s to call on the Sons of Liberty and their associated groups. The sans cou—other groups that get less press.”
I shook my head. I shook it hard. “Honeypot” formed itself in my head. I’d read it in novels of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Honeypot was a seductive person, usually a female, of course, at least when approaching a male, who could convince people to act against their best principles—who could sometimes convince them to act against their best wishes. All to benefit some cause or conspiracy. I couldn’t quite put things together. Not rationally. My throat had gone all tight, and I felt like I was going to throw up. “Not that,” I told Nat’s scared gaze. “Not now. I mean, what do you want of me? What did you people always want of me? Why did you . . . Why did Ben . . . Why was Ben thrown at me? Did he even want . . .” I couldn’t breathe and my chest hurt. I felt like I was going to drop dead of a heart attack, right here, right now, after all my failed suicide attempts.
“What?” Nat asked, and seemed genuinely surprised, but the fear was still there, haunting and dark behind his eyes. “I just want to protect you. You were Uncle Benjamin’s . . . You were Uncle Benjamin’s. The only family he had beside us. He’d want you kept safe and alive.”
“He was making reports from prison,” I said, and my voice came out squeaky and raspy, both, as if the sound was having trouble making it past my throat. “To . . . to whom? How?”
“We had . . .” Nat licked his lips. “We have a network. It’s not very good or very big. When we can, we’d like to . . . that is . . . When we can we save our own.” He seemed to catch something in my eyes, some accusation I couldn’t even make. “We were . . . they were, I was too young to know anything, of course, but I understand they’d organized a rescue, but it was all gone before . . . My uncle was dead.”
Like that made things better. So, rescue had been on the way if I’d let Ben live a little longer. Suffer a little longer. If I could have endured his pain, he might be alive today. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, my sore aching feet. If there was a God up there, any God, he was a stone cold bastard, much worse than I was, and I was a monster.
“Look,” Nat said, he threw his cigarette at his feet and stomped on it. He opened his hands and showed me the palms, in a gesture of defenselessness. “Look, I want to save you. My family and I might escape if you fell, but I . . . But I don’t think I could live with it. Not now.” He looked up and said a word that I didn’t think was in his vocabulary. “Please,” he said. “Please.” I had no idea what he was asking me for, though, and it didn’t help. I backed up against the corner of the wall, glad for its coolness. I felt an odd longing for my cell, away from everyone.
“Listen,” he reached forward and grabbed at my sleeve. “Listen, it’s important, it’s the only way I know to keep you safe. Please, please, please, listen to me. I . . .” He hesitated. He looked at me with Ben’s dark haunted eyes. “I beg you to agree that you believe in the basic founding principles. I beg you to say you believe everyone is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then we can put you through the learning program, and while you’re learning we can protect you.” His hand clutched the ruffles on my sleeve hard, and his fingers bit at my wrist with something like desperation. “It’s not just for you, though . . . though I want you to stay alive. It’s for us, too. We’ve been unable to do anything for centuries. No one will pay any attention to rebels and our charter doesn’t allow us to cause enough damage to civilians and innocents to intimidate the population. And even if it did, they would be more likely to turn on us. They view the Good Men as safety and sane government, and if we oppose them openly, we get painted as monsters. Even if the other Good Men are against us, if we have one on our side, we have a measure of respectability and we can get—”
And now I had it. The final piece in place. Ben had been a honeypot. And Nat had been one to Max. Pursuing the goal of subverting the Good Man’s heir before he inherited. Intending to have a Good Man on their side. For the good of the cause.
They could join at sixteen. Ben and I . . . at sixteen. I felt as though I’d been beaten, every inch of my body pummeled. I was tired. I wanted to be back in my cell. I wanted to be dead. “Was that what you were trying to do with Max?” I said. “Corrupt him into your crazy religion? Did he know what you were? Did you tell him? Did you tell him why?”
“What?” He looked genuinely shocked, but of course he would. If they started training them at thirteen—“What? No. I couldn’t tell Max. I didn’t want to risk him.” He looked very pale. “That has nothing to do with this. Please, just say you believe for now.”
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“No, I don’t believe. I don’t believe in any natural rights, and I’m not sure that your vision of paradise is good for anyone, much less for everyone. I’ve studied history, Nathaniel Greene Remy. I know what your beloved paradise was really like. The bickering. The wars. The bloody stupidity. And the lack of organization. The cross-purpose efforts. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work in our far more complex world.”
But he was looking at me, so pale his hair looked dark
by comparison. That and because it looked wet with sweat. Or at least I presumed with sweat, unless someone had upended a bucket of water on his head. “Oh, God,” he said, looking up at me as if I’d grown a second head. “You can’t mean—you can’t believe—”
I didn’t want to hear it. If I’d had the energy, I’d have punched him. But I didn’t. Instead, I turned and stumbled out of there, at a half run. I was half-aware of his running behind me, and I don’t know if he followed me all the way to the street. At least, he didn’t catch up with me, because when I got to the end of the street and climbed on my broom to go through the mechanical spider, he didn’t follow me.
Sturm Und Dragged
I had no recollection of getting home, no recollection of going to bed, but when I next became aware of myself, I was in bed, in my room, completely naked and wrapped around a stuffed giraffe. I didn’t remember sleeping. I didn’t remember anything. Everything was dark. I got up and checked that my door was locked, then went back to bed, and wrapped myself around the giraffe again.
Oh, please. Stop the pity party already. It was Ben’s voice in my head. He sounded furious. But I didn’t want to hear it. I wasn’t having a pity party. I’d realized what my life had been. It had all fallen in place.
I turned over and stared at the perfect darkness that obscured the ceiling. Ben had been thrown at me by his family, by his religion. I refused to believe he hadn’t loved me. There were too many moments of shared humor, too many moments of delight in just being together. Those can’t be faked or pretended. The friendship had been true and perhaps the love, but it remained that it had been an arranged relationship. He hadn’t felt about me the way I’d felt about him.
But most painful, I’d killed Ben. I’d truly murdered him. I looked at my hands and remembered the homemade knife, and Ben’s throat and the final flash of gratitude in his eyes. Rescue had been on the way. And I’d bet that the Remys could get access to the best regen. It could have saved—
It’s a pity party with guilt streamers. Listen, knucklehead, my religion didn’t throw me at you. We worried Sam half to death being involved because he was afraid I’d get hurt, while I . . .
“You?”
I was afraid you’d get hurt.
I turned over and buried my face in the giraffe. “You don’t exist,” I said. “You’re a figment of my imagination. To all my other charming characteristics I will now add being completely crazy.”
Now? He raised his non-existent eyebrow at me. Luce!
Could I smell a trace of his cologne, a hint of his shampoo in the giraffe? After fifteen years?
Only if they saved it in a sealed bag. Wait, they had to have, or it would be dusty.
I pressed my face into the giraffe and inhaled and tried to conjure Ben from non-existence. “I’m sorry. If I’d known—”
I didn’t know; you didn’t know. It might never have been true. Look, the SOL are not the most organized people in the world. They might have told Nat they were about to rescue me. They might even have believed that. But the chances are small to none. His memory in my mind waggled his hand in a dubious manner. We used to joke by saying that the individualists had failed to organize.
I didn’t dignify that with an answer, though if I thought about it, I’d confess that they didn’t seem the best organized group in the world.
Are you going to arrest them? Have them executed?
“What?”
Sam. Nat. My family. They are guilty of illegal beliefs.
They were. And I knew they were. And while I didn’t know what the Sons of Liberty actually had done, as compared to what the media claimed they did, I knew it had to have involved some murders, some destruction of property, but how much, and in what circumstances?
And in my head, Ben set his jaw in the way I’d been familiar with, the way that meant he was about to stand his ground and hold it because he was sure he was right. We look after our own, he said.
“Nat killed my father.”
I think that fell under private vendetta, Ben said. You can’t deny him the right of avenging Max. But I won’t deny we’d kill Good Men if . . . Most of them do such things that . . . He stopped and shrugged. You’ll figure it out. Most Good Men aren’t good.
If they were three-hundred-year-old Mules who murdered their own children to survive, I supposed they couldn’t be, but I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “I will presume that . . .” I couldn’t believe that Ben would do anything bad. Illegal, perhaps, but not bad. And Ben had been one of them. “I’ll presume that you wouldn’t have joined if they committed evil acts.”
Define evil.
“Things that hurt people.”
Don’t be an infant. Of course we hurt people. Even if they’d managed to rescue me from prison, guards would have died in the raid. I guarantee it. And property would get destroyed. By that definition I did commit evil more than a few times.
“You killed people?”
Only when it couldn’t be avoided.
I wanted to ask him where and when it had happened, but reminded myself he wouldn’t be able to tell me. One thing is to allow your subconscious to pretend to be the ghost of your long-lost friend. Another is to start believing he really is such. Instead I concentrated on the evil part. “You wouldn’t hurt someone who either hadn’t deserved it . . .” I paused. “You wouldn’t kill someone unless doing so would prevent more deaths. Or if you had to kill in self-defense.”
I wouldn’t imprison them either, he said. Or interfere with them. You could say I respected their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So. He’d won. He usually won our verbal sparring bouts. “It’s not that simple,” I said. “They can’t make me change my religion to suit their needs. They can’t ask me to sell my soul.”
You aren’t sure you have a soul, remember? I’ll agree that Nat handled it badly, but—
“There was no way they could have handled it that I would have agreed. Your Usaian fanaticism is a pipe dream. If it was so wonderful, why did the original fall apart, amid external and internal strife? Why couldn’t it even defend itself? The Regime of the Good Men has been stable for longer than it existed. And we’ve kept people happier.”
Or so we’ll think so long as news is censored.
I was quiet.
So, you’re not going to denounce my family.
“Or harm them, no. How could you think I would?”
Then what are you going to do?
“I’m going to govern.”
Riders on the Sturm
I would also have to find a way to defend my house and my seacity. I’d been holding on to a mythical hope, a child’s game of pretending. I’d always known in the end it would come down to me, and just to me. It always had. And it should. My problem, my solution. Why should I have been counting on Nat Remy? As much as I’d failed in the past, everything that needed to be done to protect myself, or Ben, or anyone else for that matter, had been my business. My job.
I dressed and went to the office. My father’s office. My office. No one stopped me. No one questioned me. I dreaded that Sam would ask me about where I’d gone with Nat, but he didn’t. He took no more notice of me than if it had been my routine always to come and sit behind the desk and deal with accumulated paperwork.
The first day I did no more than sign piles and piles of paper with my signet ring. It was surprisingly tiring, the movement of pulling a paper from the pile and pressing my ring against it. I didn’t read the paper. I couldn’t read the paper. I couldn’t concentrate enough to do it. But just signing them gave me something to do, and while the rest of the office moved around me, and Sam Remy now and then brought over new piles of paper, I found myself fitting in, acting as though it were all normal. Routine. No more than routine. Someone brought me coffee. I drank it. Then I returned to my work.
After sundown, someone turned on the lights, and clerks started leaving. At last Sam Remy stood up. He looked hesitantly at me. “You should have
dinner,” he said. He didn’t add “son” but I could hear it in the tone of his voice.
“I’m not hungry,” I said. But I did get up and leave the office. There was no one else there, so my staying would serve no purpose.
Sam left before me. On my way to my room, I passed a room where the door was insufficiently latched, and voices came from it. I’d swear I recognized Sam’s voice and Nat’s voice.
“—an unconscionable risk,” Sam said.
Then something muffled, and then Nat’s—I was sure of it—voice, “He’s not going to.”
“How can you be sure? Nat, you should have asked before, you should have tried— You pushed him in a stupid way. What on Earth made you think it would work?”
“It would have worked with Max.”
“He’s not Max. ”
“No.” A pause. “No.”
“Are you sure that . . .” Muffled.
“Out of time.”
Muffled.
“Not if he dies. I couldn’t stand it. I tell you I couldn’t stand it.”
I wondered if he were talking about me, but it seemed unlikely. Why wouldn’t he be able to stand it if I died? Until a few days ago, he’d thought me dead. More likely that he couldn’t stand the mess if I died. That made perfect sense. But I had no intention of dying.
I went to my room. I crawled into bed, fully dressed. Sometime in the night, I felt the impact of a body on my bed and a furry face pressed near mine. Goldie.
From the darkness came the sound of Nat settling down inside my door. So, he was still guarding me. Of course he was. He didn’t want the seacity thrown into worse turmoil by my death.
In the morning when I woke up, he was gone. There was no one in the room, either, but a small table had been wheeled in with breakfast. Just looking at it turned my stomach, but I forced myself to have coffee and a slice of bread before cleaning—I used the fresher on vibro this time—and putting on clean clothes.
A Few Good Men Page 17
