Heinlein's Finches

by Robin Banks

  “Then I’m all out of ideas. If we want to stay as we are, and make no changes at all, then we need to somehow convince them that it’s all just peachy as it is. Three dead cadets and two broken legs notwithstanding.”

  Something has been bugging me, so I let it out. “We haven’t tried thinking about ways of stopping this. We’re looking for ways to manage it, rather than stop it.” They both stare at me. “Well, we haven’t. I’m not saying there is a way to make it all go away. Just that we’ve never even talked about it up to now.”

  They stare at each other. Gwen nods. “That’s right. We haven’t. We’ve assumed that it was inevitable, and all we could do was manage it. We all assumed it, so we created a group-wide blind spot. What else did we assume?”

  I’ve been thinking about this. “That the incidents were isolated.” They stare at me again. “Which, of course, they could be. Separate wackos from separate colonies separately deciding to take a pop at Gwen.”

  Asher sounds stunned. “But plenty does not support it. All the attacks have been similar. Admittedly, people wanting to do similar things for similar reasons and all having access to similar resources could be expected to behave similarly. But there could be more to it than that.” He looks at Gwen. “This could be a conspiracy.”

  Gwen snorts. “A gang of conspirators, hiding somewhere, plotting to kill me, and sending random assassins from all over? Bit far-fetched, isn’t it? It’d be far-fetched enough if I was someone important. But I’m a lecturer. I sit in an office, answer the odd query, publish academic papers, and occasionally piss someone off in the process. The lectures I give amount to very little more than cultural sensitivity. That used to be standard stuff throughout all major learning institutions, government offices, even private companies on Old Terra. Well, not everywhere, but as near as dammit.”

  Asher cuts in. “But we’re not on Old Terra. And a lot of the people who consider themselves Old Terran Traditionalists these days don’t agree with much of that. I should know. I grew up with some of them. I ought to introduce you to some of my relatives one of these days. Only they’d hate you and you’d hate them and I hate them too, so let’s not.” He nods. “There are people in a position to organize something like this, and plenty of people who’d like to but can’t. The real issue is working out who fits in both camps.”

  Gwen pulls a face. “The real issue right now is working out what we’re going to tell those uniformed jackholes in there.”

  Asher looks puzzled. “What do you mean? We give them the facts and we tell them our conclusions.”

  “Or we don’t.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “If there is a conspiracy, we don’t know who’s in on it. We don’t know who we can trust. That includes the Colonel and his cronies.”

  “Gwen, you know how I feel about the Patrol, but I think you’ve gone and lost it now. These people have served. They’ve taken an oath.”

  “But I haven’t. I graduated and I never served. I know I’m contributing in my own way, but I am not really Patrol, and that matters to some people. And anyway they may not be in on it, but they may be connected to people who are. Easier to keep a secret the fewer people know about it. If we know about them but they don’t know we know, that’d give us our edge back.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Asher sounds appalled. “Based on a wild supposition we just decide that the entire world is a potential threat? Cut ourselves off from all our resources? Where do you stop? Do you still trust me? Her?”

  “I think there’s another danger here,” I cut in. “The Academy and the Patrol are both used to acting upon Gwen’s suppositions. That’s literally what they pay her for. So if we go to them with a theory, there’s a good chance they’ll jump on it without much thinking. They like answers, not questions. And if we’re wrong, that’s gonna send them on a wild goose chase that won't do a damn thing to improve Gwen’s safety.”

  “That’s a point. We should give them information, not suppositions.” Gwen agrees.

  Asher nods curtly.

  “So we tell them about each incident, and remind them that we have dealt effectively with them thus far, so despite the increased frequency we still have our shit in order?”

  Asher nods again.

  “Unless you want an improvement in your security,” I remind them. “You could get someone better than me. Be hard not to, really. I’m not precisely a state-of-the-art bodyguard.”

  They both look at me as if I’d sprouted horns.

  “Pray tell,” Gwen starts, and I know that I’m in trouble. “What improvement exactly should we be looking for? Someone who goes around pre-emptively attacking would-be assailants? That’d be just grand. Or someone who demands that we don’t go out in public, doesn’t let anyone near us, locks us in a box? That’d be such a huge improvement to my life.”

  “It may help prolong it.”

  “That’s precisely what I want: a long, intolerable life.”

  “At some point, though,” Asher has that faraway look again, “we’re going to have to decide how we’ll know when we no longer have it under control. And I’d like that to be before you get killed.” His face is expressionless, but his voice sounds brittle. I think that’s what does it. Gwen rushes up to him and suddenly she doesn’t seem so tough.

  “We will. I promise you. Let’s get through this meeting. Then we can regroup and try and be more proactive.”

  “It’s a deal. Now help me out of this unholy contraption. You have squishy bits and I have hands. And I want to make you regret all your fawning over that posh bastard.”

  By unspoken agreement, I go and take myself for a walk. With the state of Asher’s legs, having too many moving parts seems too risky a proposition. Plus they haven’t had any alone time in ages. Neither have I, really, but it seems to me that a couple would need more privacy. It’s easier to be alone in a crowd that to be a couple in a crowd, I think.

  When I return, after a reasonable period of time and a quick psi-scan just to make sure I'm not disturbing, I find them all snuggled up, looking content. Whatever they managed to do seems to have taken the edge off.

  I squeeze into the bed on the other side of Gwen, so I don’t nudge Asher’s legs. It’s peaceful here.

  “Tell me the story of how you two met?”

  Gwen smiles at me. "Listen to you, talking about our smoochy moments as if they were fairy tales.

  “They’re old enough to be,” says Asher, and gets an elbow in the ribs for his troubles. “Ouch. Well, obviously the first moment I laid my eyes on her, I had no idea what I was looking at so I didn’t take any notice. I mean, she’s pretty enough, but a lot of girls are.” Bang goes the elbow.

  “And I’d noticed him, what with him being one of my instructors, but frankly I was busy and he seemed to be completely obsessed with the building of the big Tank and the new training program. Always rushing around like he was on drugs, always surrounded by a gaggle of floaters, all equally obsessed.”

  “You make me sound like a total dork.”

  “You are a total dork, sweetie. Foolhardy, too. We were on the third floor of the Tech tower for a meeting in my second term and he got bored or something, so he climbed out of the window.”

  “Oh, yeah, I did that. I might have been trying to show off a bit then.”

  “Sure. Nothing speaks to a girl’s heart like the sight of an alleged adult climbing out of a window three stories up and with no safety whatsoever.”

  “…but you did notice me,” he stretches his arms and crosses them behind his head.

  “Yes, I did.” She rolls her eyes. “But I didn’t do anything and you wouldn’t do anything so nothing happened for ages. I didn’t think anything would happen, ever, really.”

  “Neither did I. I should be grateful to Officer Unfriendly, I guess. But I’m not.” Asher face darkens.

  Gwen turns to me. “In those days, the Academy was different. You might think we’re not a haven of tolerance and non-confo
rmity now,” I snort at that, “but it used to be a lot worse. They only started allowing women in the year before I joined. And I was different, too.”

  Asher strokes her arm.

  “It’s surprising how elitist a scholarship-only institution can be, really. Turns out it’s a lot easier to win a scholarship if you come from a good family, an established family. Or at least a stable one.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “And I didn’t. My mother bit more than she could chew with my dad. She liked him because he was nothing like her. Higher class, family with plenty of credit, dashing, exciting. A free spirit. Which it’s easy to be if you don’t have to earn your place or your keep. But she only saw his devil-may-care attitude, not what it may mean for her, or us. She thought of their relationship as some kind of barrier-shattering romance. He just saw it as a conquest, I think. He’s made more since. He never meant it to go as far as the baby-having, though he was keen on the baby-making. He definitely didn’t mean it as a long-term thing. He had already moved on to his next catch by the time my mother found out that she was expecting.

  “She didn’t have to go through with it, but I think she hoped that having a baby would make him come back. She was wrong, and by the time she accepted that, it was too late to get rid of me. So instead she decided that it was my fault that he left her. Which made her bitter. Which made her very hard to live with. Which made it much less likely for another man to be interested in her. Which made her more bitter. What’s that expression St Robinson used?”

  “An ingrown toenail of a person,” says Asher, putting his arm over her shoulder and pulling her into him.

  “Anyway. So When I got old enough…”

  “Not old enough,” Asher shakes his head and she makes a face at him.

  “…I just made sure I was home as little as possible. And you know how that goes.”

  Asher kisses the top of her head. “No, love, she doesn’t,” he murmurs.

  “Well, I didn’t have the credit or support or connections – or inclination, really – to get into the sort of stuff a good tube girl with an eye on a colonial future should be doing. Training clubs and extra courses and activities. All regimented and regulated, all slow and boring and repetitive. I got enough of people telling me who to be and what to do at school and at home. But on a tube there’s not a lot of scope for non-compliance. Nor any room for it, either. There aren’t that many places where you can hang out without getting moved on, and most of them are not good places. And most of the people you find there, well, they’re not bad people, but they’re bad news.

  “But after a while, that becomes home. We all fit in together because none of us fit in anywhere else. None of us looked quite right, or dressed quite right, or talked quite right. We didn’t think right, really. But it was all ok because we were all not-quite-right together.

  “Then you realize that you can’t really go back, that to fit in again you’d have to give up that part of you.” I nod at that. “And even then it probably wouldn’t really make a difference what you do, how well you behave, because regular people are going to treat you as if you were bad anyway. So there’s no real advantage to not doing bad stuff. And you end up enjoying it, actually, because it feels like retribution. They expect you to be bad and do bad things, or just treat you as if you’d done bad things already, so you end up doing stuff you shouldn’t just to spite them.

  “The real problem is that people’s behaviors tend to escalate. I never got into anything really bad myself, but I had a few scrapes, and my friends had started going to jail, or dying off. So when the Academy bulletin came up, I applied, because I needed to change my luck. I never thought I would get in, but I did.”

  Asher smiles. “And within months she’d tested out of half the curriculum and was running her own research project.”

  “Yeah. That was weird.” It’s Asher’s turn to roll his eyes. “But anyway, when I got here, I was still a little bit wild. Didn’t know how to behave. Didn’t know how to dress.”

  “Didn’t know how to talk to the authorities,” interjects Asher.

  “Did not know that. And I ended up finding myself surrounded by the same kind of people I knew back at home. I spent more time with townies than cadets. I’d changed place without changing crowds, because I hadn’t really changed myself, you see?

  “Anyway, one day these asshole town guards come to the campus. We were just hanging out in the building site for the new Tank. There were just a few of us, not doing anything bad. Not doing anything, really. But these two assholes decided we shouldn’t have been there. They wanted us to move on, which we didn’t need to do. They wanted to search us, which they didn’t have a right to. So I said no. And maybe my tone was not deferential enough.”

  Asher snorts.

  “…ok, maybe I aggravated them on purpose. But one of the guards grabs me and starts to drag me off away from my friends and into the building site, calls me all kinds of bad names, and I see in his eyes that he’s totally lost it. And this terrible keening starts, like a really high pitch foghorn going off and just not stopping. And it takes me a while to realize that it’s coming from my mouth. Next thing I know, the guard that was dragging me is on the ground and the other guard has drawn his blaster and he,” she points at Asher, “just appears out of nowhere and steps in front of me, between me and a guard with a drawn blaster and the other asshole still on the floor. And he’s growling.”

  “I wasn’t growling!” laughs Asher.

  “He was growling, growling and pointing to the wall behind him, telling the guards that this is a private site over which they have no jurisdiction and they’re on camera and won’t it be interesting to see what their superiors makes of them dragging off a wee girl for godsknow what purpose, and then training a weapon on her, and maybe they should leave now and never come back.”

  “What milady is neglecting to mention is that, although I was indeed alerted by her maidenly cry of distress, I turned up too late to the party. The reason the congenital jackass who was hauling her off was on the ground was that he was dealing with a couple of broken fingers and bleeding eyeballs. Oh, and a blown knee.”

  “I have no idea how that happened.”

  “Operant conditioning works, lass. You did good.” He kisses her head. “So I was less of a white knight, more the clean-up crew.”

  “You stood in front of a blaster for me.”

  “Eh. You did all the hard work.”

  “And then he hugged me tight, so all I could feel were his bony ribs pocking holes in my face, and over my head he told the city kids who’d finally rolled up what he thought of them for not protecting me and that they better scram. Still growling. I could feel the vibration through his tunic.

  “Then he lifted me up and actually carried me over to his office, and made me a cup of tea.”

  I splutter. “A cup of tea? Is it a euphemism I’m not familiar with?”

  “A cup of tea.” She nods. “He was a perfect gentleman and wouldn’t touch me then, nor for weeks afterwards. Hell, more like months.”

  “My love, I wanted you for a very long time and more than I ever wanted anyone or anything else, but I would never, ever touch you under those circumstances. I’ll have you because you want me, not out of a stress reaction or as a thank you or out of duty or something.” He shudders. “I’ll have you if and when you really want me.”

  “But you made us wait till graduation.” She kisses his chin.

  “Yeah. That might have been overkill on my part.”

  “What were you waiting for?” I ask.

  “She was a student. I was her teacher.”

  “You could have spoken to the Chancellor about that.”

  “I could have. But that wasn’t the only issue. I was still getting back on my feet and she was just settling into her own. I wanted us both to be as strong individually as we could be together.”

  Gwen shakes her head at him. “Which, if it were possible, would make us an incred
ibly piss-poor couple.”

  “True dat. I was dead wrong about that. But that wasn’t all of it. I knew that I wasn’t good enough for you.” She snorts. “No, it’s true. I know it’s true. I knew I wasn’t good enough, and I was going to wait until I was. Then I realized that I’m never going to be. I just have to keep trying as hard as I can.”

  The following day we’re summoned to a meeting in the Chancellor’s office. No surprises there, really; we knew that the meeting was coming. That’s about it for things I expected, though.

  When we walk in, we see that the Chancellor has relinquished his desk. The Chancellor’s desk and the chair behind it are so immense and ornate that observers are either immediately intimidated by their awesomeness – the intended result, I am sure – or repulsed by the waste. I believed the Chancellor to be as willing to lend anyone his throne as he’d be to lend them his underthings; yet, after ushering us in, he sits himself on a chair at one end of the desk. On the throne sits Colonel Darrington, in all his glory. Captain Kendall sits at the other end of the desk.

  The Chancellor waves Asher into a spot right in front the desk. Gwen and I are to sit either side of him on little office chairs. The three of them can tower over us from behind the wooden bastion of the desk, while we sit before and beneath them like the naughty little schoolteachers we are. Our inferiority having been clearly established, the meeting can commence.

  The Colonel is clearly in charge of the proceedings. “Corporal McGee, Mrs. McGee, Citizen Taua, thank you for meeting with us at such short notice. As you know, we are here to discuss the security measures around your wife in the wake of the recent attacks.”

  All of this delivered to Asher, who’s suddenly back to being a Corporal. No mention of his current teaching position, or of the fact that Gwen is also a Professor. The guy’s hardly even looked at her. What the hell?

  “The increased frequency of these episodes seems to indicate that we can no longer consider them aberrant; they appear to be part of the status quo. This is not a situation we can allow to continue as is, obviously. Our responsibilities towards our civilian staff aside, the honor of the Patrol is at stake. We can hardly claim to be protectors of our colonies when we cannot even protect our own people.