A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  For three days I went to the office. For three days, I electronically signed papers I didn’t read. For three nights, Goldie slept in my bed, his warmth and company my only protection against the terrible cold of knowing myself alone, the terrible fear of knowing I couldn’t do anything to protect those who depended on me.

  For three nights, Nat slept across my door, on the inside. I knew this, because I could hear him breathe, and because Goldie wouldn’t be there without him. But I didn’t see him. And it was better I didn’t see him. After all, what good would it do to dredge up old trouble? He had tried to railroad me into joining a religion. I’d contravened his plans. He was still protecting me for the sake of the rest of the people in the domain. But that was it. It was not like there was any great affection or even respect between us. I would say I felt sorry for him.

  Except you’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself, Ben said, and I supposed he was right. And there was nothing I could answer to this, so I didn’t.

  On the fourth day, I accidentally skimmed one of the papers on my desk, and paused. The paper made no sense whatsoever. “Sam,” I said, puzzled at my voice wavering.

  “Sir,” he said and approached my desk. Did Sam look like he was afraid I’d turn on him and have him arrested, or worse? Oh, not outwardly. His external demeanor was the same as always—responsible, respectful, perhaps paternal despite and behind all this. But there was a hint of cringe in his gaze.

  I suspected it wasn’t even for him. Sam Remy had the sort of mind that could face the noose or worse easily enough. But this, if I were so disposed, would mean the death of his entire family. And I knew Sam much too well to think that didn’t matter.

  The worst was that part of me longed for him to treat me as he had when I was a child—as though I were his brother or his son. I longed to hear him call me Luce, or “son.” But he just stood there, very tense, staring at me.

  “These papers,” I put my hand on the pile I’d just skimmed. “They direct farmers what to plant where, right?”

  He inclined his head.

  I frowned at him. “We don’t have farms. There isn’t enough soil on the island to make for significant fields.”

  He shook his head. “No, but we do have territory in North America that falls under our jurisdiction.”

  I frowned at the paper. “But . . . North America doesn’t have two growing seasons. Not in the northern parts. Show me where this is.” I stabbed my finger at the coordinates on the map.

  Sam looked grave. “No. I know. But we always do it like that. We issue the seed to farmers and have them seed in November.”

  “Excuse me? Why?”

  “Uh . . . it’s always been policy.”

  It just wasn’t good enough. I pulled another paper. “And this one?” I said.

  Sam looked around at the office.

  “Samuel Remy, answer me, is that also policy?” Was the man I had trusted since I could remember, a monster, as big a monster as my father, or worse?

  He shook his head. “Not here, sir. Those documents are eyes only, and have always gone from the Good Man to me and from me to the Good Man. That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it was under my father too. If you wish to discuss it, I think we should be in private.”

  “You can’t mean we’ve been kill—”

  “Not here, sir. I have your best interests at heart.”

  “My best—” but then I looked at the pile of papers and back at Sam Remy. My best interests might be right. If anything in these papers got out, I suspected that no Good Man would be left alive. At least I hoped not. And regardless of how bad my kind was, of this I was innocent. Other Good Men had sons who might be as guiltless. And I didn’t want to reignite a new set of turmoils that would consume the innocent along with the guilty.

  “Into my private office, Mr. Remy. Now.” I picked up the pages that puzzled me and stalked out into the plush confines of the inner sanctum that could be locked and which I knew, from my father’s use of it, was soundproof.

  Sam Remy walked in after me, standing very tall in his plain dark suit. And it’s no use at all telling me he was shorter than Nat and Nat was shorter than myself. I know all that. But in my mind, he was still a father figure. And I still believed he must have a moral reason for this, but I’d be damned if I could explain it.

  As soon as he closed the door, I thrust the sheaf of papers at him. “Why are we creating famines? Why are we releasing targeted plagues among the people? Why are we killing inventors and curtailing inventions? Why—”

  “We?”

  The single word stopped me, and looking at Sam I could tell he looked grey and tired, exhausted, really. Like a man who’s been carrying a heavy weight uphill for a long time, like a man who’s lived divided, and who knows it, and on whom the pressure of a double life has been growing over the years, and who has been aged and sickened by it.

  “You are . . . you were my father’s right hand. You administered . . .”

  He looked at me, serious, intent. “My son told me,” he said.

  And for a moment, scrambling, I wondered what his son had told him, and whether it was me he was angry at. But then he said. “He told me that there was only one man here before, his brain transplanted . . .” He took a deep breath. “I won’t say I . . . my ancestors for that matter, hadn’t suspected it, but it seemed so far-fetched and we had no proof. And besides, what could we do about it? And what could we do about those policies, which he enforced ruthlessly? What could we do? And don’t tell me we could have fought back or died trying. Then he’d acquire other servants and I’d be executed, and nothing, nothing would change. It was all your . . . his decision. All his doing, Luce. And don’t tell me we should have tried to murder him. There have been attempts. On him and on all the other Good Men, but the few times they succeeded, the uninstructed heir got killed and other Good Men took over. There used to be eighty, you know? No, we didn’t know why. Of course, it makes sense now.”

  My mouth was wide open, and I snapped it closed. I backed up, blindly, to my desk chair and dropped into it, staring at him.

  “I’m sorry you had to find out this way, Luce, but what could I do? For all I knew, you wanted to continue the policies. Besides, would you have believed me, if you hadn’t seen those papers?”

  I shook my head. I probably would have thought he was feeding me some crazy Usaian line. “But . . . if I’d signed . . .”

  “Then everything would go on as it has.”

  “But . . . I signed some . . . I want them back. The ones I signed before . . .”

  He shook his head. “Those are not . . . of this kind. And if . . .” He chewed his lip. “At the risk of your condemning me for treason, I thwarted a lot of those orders, even under your father. I changed them, or made it look like those executing them were incompetent. If you wish to fire me for—”

  “No,” I said. “No, Sam. But . . . why? It can’t just be chaotic evil with no reason. Why was my father murdering thousands of people by means ranging from famine to denial of new medications? Why?”

  “Three hundred years of stability.”

  “What?”

  “Three hundred years of stability, sir. People say that the USA was an impractical dream, an impossible system because it collapsed, eventually, on its own, and because it was never stable. But the truth is, countries . . . or lands . . . or worlds with growing populations and vigorous innovation aren’t stable as such. Too many young men will bring fast innovation and, with it, turmoil. You don’t want that; you have to let war or plague kill it. Too much food and the middle class grows fat and sassy and is no longer contented with being the servants and henchmen of the nobility. What we have is a feudal system, and a feudal system necessitates closed population and technology, where things change very slowly, if at all.” He paused for a moment, then went to the chair across the desk from me. He stood behind it, clasping the back hard. “Damn it, Luce, I sent you history gems.”

  “You . . .” I sai
d, and then, out of my inadequate supply of words, I fished, “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “It was all I could do. Like with this situation, all I could do was fake incompetence, but not so much incompetence I got dismissed.” He paused and tightened his lips. His fingers drummed on the back of the chair. “My son told you that he and Martha and Abigail are the only Usaians in the family and that his mother and I are well out of it. That we might have sympathetic ideas but are not involved. I’m sure you were not fooled. Nat does almost everything well, except lie. He’s a terrible liar. He can’t possibly have fooled you. He and my other children didn’t name themselves. And I didn’t name myself. My name is Samuel Adams Remy. You know what we believe in. You know what Usaians believe in. You can’t have believed I’d willingly do this or that I’d have done it at all had I any other choice.”

  “Because of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” I asked. “But that’s nonsense. I told Nat . . . I mean, those things don’t exist. They have no independent existence outside human minds. They aren’t natural laws. They aren’t laws of any kind. And if one doesn’t believe in God, one doesn’t believe in them.”

  He stood up and grabbed my hands on the desk. “If one believes in humanity one has to believe in them,” he said. “Because they have no independent existence outside humans, but humans don’t have an existence outside them—not real humans; not the best in humans. Not . . .” He realized he was holding my hands, let go, and stepped back. “I’m sorry. Let’s take this rationally. Why is that policy evil?” He waved at the nasty directives on the desk. “Why were you so shocked by them?”

  “It kills people!”

  “So does overpopulation,” he said. “So do the wars that result from overpopulation. So does strife, and lack of stability. They also blight lives. So, why are those actions, which are designed to counter the evils that would result from their not being enforced, evil?”

  “Because . . .” I struggled. “Because . . .” I felt like I was about ten years old. I wanted to run out of the office, slam the door, and go hide out in the garden until my anger and confusion passed.

  But if I ran out of the office, Sam would . . . I didn’t even know what he would do. I knew I wasn’t ten. I knew I was the Good Man, and whether this policy went forward or not was my decision. And I couldn’t let it go forward.

  “It’s wrong!” I said. “For one man . . . especially a Mule, one . . . individual to decide who lives and who dies, for . . . It’s different if it just happens, if it comes from conditions. But for one individual to decide it for everyone else, to coldly murder others, to say it is for their own good . . . it’s evil. I can’t explain it. It’s evil.”

  “It’s only evil if you believe there’s intrinsic value in each individual,” Sam said, ruthless. “Only if you believe it matters that individuals are treated like objects. And you can only care, if each individual, in your mind, has the right to self-determination.”

  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” I said, my voice sounding very odd.

  “Were you and Nat guilty of murder when you cut down the Scrubbers who tried to ambush you in front of your room?”

  “What? No. They were trying to kill us.”

  “And what gave you the right to defend yourselves?”

  “What? Of course we had the right—”

  “Did you? The majority of the Good Men, the constituted authorities of this world, who have governed for three hundred years, think you should die. What right do you have to live?”

  “I damn well have the right to live as long as I can stay alive,” I said. “I— Oh.” I scratched at my nose. “But Nature? And Nature’s God?”

  Sam shrugged. “I am a religious man. But some of my brethren aren’t. Some of them simply believe in humans being humans and having the right to be human.”

  I took a deep breath. “I thought,” I said, slowly, “that you weren’t allowed to spank me, not even when I was little.”

  “What?” Sam said, genuinely surprised.

  “That was a much worse spanking than when you caught Ben and me playing in the apple tree.” I looked up and met his worried expression. “And perhaps even more effective.” I raised my hand at him. “No. I’m not ready to make any profession of faith.” I thrust the papers at him. “Burn those damn orders, then get me the gems of all the real history of this damned seacity. I want to know what’s been going on. And don’t tell me it doesn’t exist. My fathe— I’m sure he had eyes-only history.”

  He quirked his mouth at me. “My ancestors have made . . . there is a record.”

  “Good. Bring it to me in my room.”

  When the Sturm Breaks

  I don’t know how long I spent looking at gems, in my reader, in my room. I found the oldest one and looked at it, then read forward, slowly.

  It wasn’t just that the creature who had called himself my father had engineered famines and even engaged in wars with his fellow Good Men which were over nothing at all and simply designed to make sure the population of young men was kept down. Young men were troublesome, of course. Get enough of them in a population and you’d get war. Or innovation. Both of which could break the rule of Good Men.

  All the way back, in the time of turmoils, there had been heavy suppression of information and of the network of computers that had allowed people to talk to each other, bypassing official channels, for much of the twenty-first century. Information was deemed special and important. After all, it could be misused and used to incite the wrong sort of opinions.

  So, now, one needed a special license to connect to such a network, and only the right people were allowed to do so—the right people being those with a government purpose. Any media from news to porno holos had to go through the information council which was controlled by all the Good Men, in league. There was some sort of communication limiter in Circum. It prevented most peer-to-peer talk, beyond one-on-one. A private citizen couldn’t even call five friends at the same time. Not without a license. And if you called too many of them serially, you’d find the authorities at your door, too.

  And so no one knew how much of our daily life was controlled.

  I don’t know which shocked me more, the minute control of life, or the clumsiness of the control. By which I don’t mean it was blunt—oh, sure it was, at the beginning. Famines and wars are large implements of killing, they take masses at a time. And they were still employed in my day, but only in rare emergencies.

  Most of the time, what happened was that the troublesome elements were identified early on. Under the current regime, in all but the most backward domains, all young children were tested, exhaustively, and those that were too creative, too intelligent, too . . . different could be either eliminated, destroyed or channeled into fields where they would do no harm.

  As for an excess of young males, that could be curtailed by keeping food scarce and by managing the mass media and public opinion to make the idea of too many children repugnant.

  When all that failed—and some of it had; I wonder how much through Sam’s intervention, and how much because those people were cut off from the seacity proper and living in wilderness that had been almost depopulated since the time of the turmoils—there were famines and other more overtly evil tactics. Which was why I’d found those documents.

  I didn’t know what it said about me that it was the less overt tactics that revolted me more. My hackles rose, my teeth clenched, and I felt vaguely sick to my stomach. It was as though all these people, unknowing, were as imprisoned as I’d been in that cell. Only I’d known it and they didn’t.

  The touch on my shoulder made me jump half out of my skin and turn, away from the projected holograms.

  Nat stood by the desk, smoking. He gestured at the gem reader. “Shut it off and unlock the door. You have the house in a flap. You’ve not shown up for any meals, and haven’t answered the link when my father tried to call you. My father said you were just busy, but I think even he is afraid cunn
ing assassins have got in.”

  I pulled back from the desk and blinked up at him, then rubbed my eyes, which felt like someone had poured sand on them. My voice wouldn’t come out at first, and I realized my throat felt very dry, so I cleared it and said, “How . . . long have I been in here?”

  “Twelve hours,” he said. His smile was wry. “First you blew up at my father and dragged him to a private conference, then you locked yourself in here. Half the house thinks you’ve gone mad; the other, that you’re writing Father’s death sentence. I thought I’d better come in the secret way before he has to get honest at someone and tell them you’ve always been mad.” He reached past me for the link button on the desk. “Do you mind?”

  I didn’t mind, so I let him and because the ash was growing long on his cigarette, I reached for the ashtray box, and held it out for him. He shook his ash into it and, as the link pinged said, “Dad. He’s alive. Have them send up dinner, will you? He didn’t realize how long it had been.”

  Sam sounded tired, as he answered. “I figured,” he said. “Shall do.”

  Nat stepped back, picked up the porcelain box from my hand, looked around the room, as though seeing it for the first time. “Your furniture?”

  “Yes. My childhood furniture. You saw it before when you . . . after Martha—” I didn’t want to say just before we went to the horrible meeting. My thoughts about the meeting had shifted. Everything had shifted, and thinking about it made me feel vaguely sick.

  It was still crazy and still religion, but much better than the alternative. If I were to join them . . . perhaps this could change. I could protect my people, I could protect myself and perhaps I could change things, too.

  “Yeah. Wasn’t paying attention. And the rest of the time it’s been dark.” His gaze was unreadable, as he looked around again. “I presume you like this better.” And, without waiting an answer. “You and Max would have got along.”