Heinlein's Finches

by Robin Banks

  It takes me a couple of days to realize that Asher has cleared out of his office. I don’t know if he volunteered to or was asked to. All I know is that Evans is now installed in what used to be Asher’s office, and they sure aren’t sharing.

  I have no idea where the hell Asher spends his days now. Asher’s normal schedule consists of floating, climbing, teaching, and worshipping the ground Gwen walks on. He doesn’t really do anything else. None of the above activities are options now, yet Asher leaves us after breakfast every day and we only see him at mealtimes until the evening. He can’t get back up the tower without anyone helping, and I don’t know where else he could be going.

  I can understand his need to stay out of the way. I’m doing the same. All non-essential uses of the Tank have been suspended for the time being, so my floating session has been cancelled. I’m finding myself with a free morning period and no inclination to spend it anywhere near Marcus, so I’ve taken to dawdling in the refectory. I know I shouldn’t, and I know I can’t carry on doing it, but I need some time to myself. I still wish I knew what Asher was getting up to.

  I don’t want to discuss this with Gwen. If Asher wanted to talk to her about it, he would do so himself. That doesn’t stop me worrying, though. I’m even more worried because Asher never talks about his day. He doesn’t talk much at all anymore, really.

  About a week into this, after breakfast, Aiden confirms my concern. As soon as the guys leave the table, Aiden moves over to sit next to me.

  “Asher is not well. Something wrong with him. Very wrong.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s got two broken legs.”

  Aiden pulls a face. “Very funny. No, not that.”

  “Sorry. Being an asshole. What do you mean?”

  “Something eating him up. You watch him. When he smiles, there’s nothing behind it.” He looks embarrassed. “You don’t feel that? With your… You know.”

  “Not really allowed to.”

  “By whom?”

  I have to think about that one. “Myself, really. It wouldn’t be right. Just because I can, it doesn’t mean I ought to.”

  “I don’t know. This feels bad. Maybe you talk to him?”

  “Heh. He doesn’t talk to me much, these days.”

  Aiden frowns. “That’s not right. You’re his best friend.”

  “Eh? What? No, I’m not. That’d be Gwen. Or Nick. Or you. Nick knows him the longest.”

  “Yeah, right. All about length of service. You’re his best friend. Weird you don’t know that. Who’s your best friend?”

  That stumps me. “Well, that’d be Gwen and Asher. Both of them.”

  “You can be yourself with them. Not a problem.”

  “Well, yeah, sure.”

  “Asher has to be somebody for Gwen. Somebody better than himself. Not her decision. His. You are his friend unconditionally – no, that’s not right. He doesn’t place conditions on himself to be your friend. I think. I don’t know.” He’s looking frustrated now. I’ve never heard him speak so much about something that wasn’t an engine.

  “No, I think I get it. I think you’re right. I just never thought about it that way.”

  He nods. “Hard to see when you’re so close. Maybe.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Maybe I just didn’t bother thinking hard enough.”

  “Easier to think if you don’t feel so much. You feel a lot. That’s a good thing.” He gets up and picks up his tray. “Maybe that can help Asher now. I know I can’t.” And he walks off.

  If I know anything about Aiden is that he’s not prone to flights of fancy. If he sees a problem, then there is a problem. So my suspicions were right. That doesn’t make me feel any better.

  At lunchtime I tell Gwen that I’m coming down with a headache. I’ve been getting them so often these days that it’s hardly an unusual event, but I normally work through them. Asking for the afternoon off causes her a degree of alarm, but I reassure her by saying that I’m going to the med bay to get checked out. Which I probably should do and totally would do, if I could do it without having to mention my psi-bility. The headaches started when I started my focus experiments. They only come on when I use my psi-bility. Mentioning the headaches without mentioning my psi-bility seems futile. Since I can’t mention my psi-bility without blowing my cover, I can’t see the point in going at all.

  When Asher makes his way out of the refectory, I follow him. I trail him right through the campus to the tower, but he doesn’t go up. He goes out instead, right out of the Academy and towards Landing. The main avenue is broad and perfectly straight, so at first I worry he might spot me, even though the place is heaving with people. He never looks back, though. After a while I stop walking like a wannabe spy, hiding around corners and ducking into doorways, and just walk a little bit behind him.

  When he gets to the middle of Landing, he stops dead and turns towards the space port. I’m perfectly baffled. There’s nothing at Landing. That’s what Landing is, really: a large open space to commemorate the landing of the first colonists, and to provide a gathering place for any large celebrations. Gods know there’s no room for that anywhere else. I don’t even know if the colonists really landed there, or if the whole thing was made up for the sake of convenience. But because Landing is bang in the middle of the bubble, and because you’re not surrounded by buildings, you get a good view of our crater walls and the bubble above them. You can also look down the main avenues at the ATR hub and the space port opposite. Apparently that’s what Asher is doing: sitting in the middle of Landing, looking down Space Port Avenue. After about five minutes of this, I start to wonder whether he’s totally lost it. Ten minute in, I’m sure of it.

  Then I see it. I can’t see the space port proper from here, but I see the ship that leaves it lift past the crater walls and go off.

  I’ve not watched a ship lift off for years. I used to love watching them as a kid, but at some point I started to treat the whole thing as a commonplace occurrence, as something beneath my notice. Watching this ship disappear into space makes me wonder how I could have ever thought that. I thought it was a sign of growing up, but if being an adult means ignoring the magnificence and sheer unlikelihood of what people can achieve, then I want to be a child again.

  I stand there watching the ship become a dot and then disappear. I wonder who may be on board. I realize that I don’t even know how ships work. I always found technology boring and I was never pushed to study it, so I didn’t. I ought to ask Aiden or Skip about it. Or Asher…

  Caught in the moment I’d forgotten about Asher, who’s now parked only a few feet in front of me, looking at me with nearly a grin. “Pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “In all honesty, I don’t know. But it was wonderful. Full of wonder. I need to remember not to take things for granted.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  He starts to head back towards the Academy, and I follow.

  “Did Gwen send you?”

  “Nah. I didn’t tell her, either. Didn’t seem right. Not my place, you know?”

  “Well, you could have had a conflict of interest.”

  “I don’t see that. She’s your wife. Seems that ought to trump most things.”

  “Guess it does,” he winces. “So why are you here?”

  “I was worried about you. You’ve been absent, physically and mentally. I didn’t know what you were up to and I didn’t know if it was good for you.” As the words leave my mouth, I’m horrified at what I’m saying. “Gods, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done this.”

  “Done what? Cared about me or followed me?”

  “Followed you.”

  “You did it because you cared about me. And I shouldn’t have caused you the worry. It was selfish of me.”

  “But if you needed the time alone…”

  “In all honesty, I don’t know what I need. A time machine. A crystal ball. To toss Evans out of a window. All of the above. You know, I used to fly them.”

  “Eh? What?”

 
; “Ships that class. Used to fly them. Used to be good at it. I liked the smaller ones better, though. Fighters would be the absolute best, if they weren’t made for fighting. But civilian small ships are still fun. I tried to get back into it after my crash, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. Hard to believe that something I used to live for could turn into something that makes me feel sick. Shit happens, hey.”

  “Seriously, I don’t know. I don’t know what the right thing to say is or if there even is one. It just all sounds so unfair.”

  “Eh. I came back. Plenty didn’t.”

  “That doesn’t make it fair.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But it makes me feel peevish when I complain.”

  “Yeah. I can see that. I don’t agree, mind you.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “The worst thing that happened to you is still the worst thing that happened to you. It doesn’t really matter if worse things happened to other people. And if I broke my toes, you wouldn’t tell me not to see a medic because you broke your legs. Suffering is not a competition. And not wanting to suffer doesn’t make you peevish. It makes you healthy.”

  “Huh. Never thought of it like that.”

  “I can’t say I ever thought about it at all. Probably just the way I was brought up, is all. I still don’t know why you come to look at ships.”

  “To remember.”

  “About flying?”

  “About the man I used to be. Or thought I was, I guess. If I’d really been that guy, I wouldn’t have fallen apart so easily.”

  “You’re full of shit and you’re making me angry.”

  Asher’s so shocked at that that he stops the ATR dead. “What?”

  “You and your double standards. You’re a hypocrite, is what you are. This place is full of people who came back in ’68. You don’t talk to them like that. You don’t treat them like that. Skip hasn’t flown a ship since then and he can hardly string three words together without having a panic attack and if anyone looks at him too long he starts shaking. If he wasn’t so good with engines he’d be parked up in some institution somewhere making up his air by processing biomass or something. You say you’re his friend, then you say awful, awful things about yourself when you’re in the same position. A better position. If you think that about yourself, what do you think of him? That he’s a piece of shit?”

  “Of course I don’t!”

  I’m so furious I’m starting to cry. “Then what is this? Why do you always judge yourself by different metrics? One rule for you and one for everyone else? You know what? You’re an asshole. Every single fucking day. Every moment. If anyone else treated you like you treat yourself, I’d fucking punch them. But because you do it to yourself it’s somehow alright?”

  “I…”

  “You can shut the fuck up and listen, for a change. And you can stop torturing my best friend! Make a new fucking rule, for fuck’s sake. If you wouldn’t say something to anyone else, don’t say it to yourself. How about that for consistency?” I’m crying so hard now I’m finding it hard to talk. Or it could be my teeth grinding. “You make me so angry.”

  “I gathered that.”

  We just stare at each other for a bit. As I start to calm down, I notice that pedestrians are rushing to get away from us. “Fine street show I just put on, hey?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Sorry. Wanna go home?”

  “In all honesty, no. But I think I have to.”

  “Where would you wanna go?”

  “A house somewhere. An actual house, maybe a farm or something. With Gwen in a pinny waiting for us with my dinner ready when we come back off the fields. And nobody trying to kill her or blowing me off mountains or taking my fucking job and making me a giant loser.”

  I wipe my face clean. “Unlikely. Gwen would never wear a pinny and I don’t think she can cook.”

  “She can’t. But to get a bit of peace of mind, for a change, I’d even eat her cooking.”

  “That’s dedication.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  We move off again.

  “I’m still furious, by the way. Just not at you. This all sucks.”

  “Thank the gods. I don’t think I could survive another of your tongue-lashings.”

  “Tongue-lashing?”

  “Well, what would you call that? A massage?”

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t need to hear all that.”

  “Actually, I did. You might want to work on your volume and delivery, just so you don’t cause widespread panic across the town, but the content was spot on.”

  “So you’re gonna do something about it?”

  He looks uncertain. “I can try. I will try. I don’t know if I can succeed. In general, and right now in particular. In all honesty, I’m drowning here. It just gets worse and worse. And I don’t know how much of this I can take.”

  “Well, what can we do about it?”

  “’We’. Hark at you, forced teaming like a pro.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We can’t do much. Look after Gwen. Well, you can, I can’t. I need to sort out my situation with the Patrol. I need to know if I will have a job here next year. And I need to know if it’s going to be a job I’m willing to take. But first I need to fix my damn legs. I don’t want to be known as Professor McGee’s husband. I know it sounds awfully Terran of me, but that’s not it. Well, that’s not all of it. I don’t want to be dead weight. It would kill me. And I can’t be the reason Gwen is forced to quit her post, either. I want that to be her decision.”

  “So now what?”

  “So I either have to fight back for my post, or I have to discover a hitherto hidden talent.”

  “You could actually work for a living. You know, like normal people.”

  “I could. But why break the habit of a lifetime?”

  “True dat. You gonna go back tomorrow? To watch the ships?”

  “Maybe. Probably. Helps me think. Why?”

  “Can I come with?”

  “Provided that you’re quiet and that you promise to be impressed by my superior knowledge of vessels, yes.”

  I blink. “Is there more to it than ‘small ship’ and ‘big ship’?”

  “If I could trust myself at all at the moment, you’d be driving me to drink.”

  “Speaking of which, you’re an asshole.”

  “Again?”

  “Still. I can wipe snot off faces and hold foreheads over toilets just as well as anyone else. Maybe better. You didn’t even try me.”

  “You’re right. Wanna get gloriously hammered tonight until my wife screams at us?”

  “Deal. My room?”

  “Deal. But you clean up in the morning.”

  “See? Asshole through and through.”

  “Race you.” And with that, he puts his ATR on high speed and scoots off into the distance.

  In the morning, we’re so much the worse for wear that we don’t even get a ticking off from Gwen.

  It was worth it, though.

  After the next batch of cadets is sent up to the tube, we spend two weeks holding our breath. Utterly Bloody Evans turned out not to require or even accept any suggestions from anyone at the Academy on which cadets to send up first. His selection, however, pretty much tallies with Asher’s pick of the weakest students. None of them are terrible. They would most probably not have failed Asher’s test. Now, though, with a new instructor and new testing methodologies and new everything… We just don’t know. All we can do is wait and see.

  That’s Asher problem: he has nothing to do now but wait and see. He needs to find something else to do, urgently, because everyone else is as busy as ever. Gwen and I still have our workload of lectures, cadets’ projects, external queries, and papers to submit. Neither of us can spend much time outside the office because of the security restrictions on Gwen. Marcus is constantly under our feet while we’re working, so Asher can’t hang out with us without hanging out with him. And anyway, it wouldn’t b
e much fun for him just sitting in our office while we work.

  He needs a project, or a hobby; something, anything to fill up his time. But because he’s still physically restricted and extremely stressed, he can’t find anything to do. And because he has nothing to do, he keeps obsessing about his stressors and his physical restrictions. If his natural temperament wasn’t so good, and if he didn’t try so hard to be a good person, he’d be a nightmare to be with. As things are, his presence is starting to be scratchy. He’s increasingly more likely to snap than to jest. He over-reacts to minor inconveniences. He keeps crossing the line between being direct and brusque. When he catches himself, he apologizes profusely, but sometimes that just doesn’t undo the damage. It may be ok if we were at our best, but we’re not. We’re all stressed and we’re all frustrated and we’re all increasingly less able to modulate our behavior or accommodate that of others.

  The fact that we work and live together doesn’t help. If we could take some time away from each other, maybe spend some time relaxing or releasing our frustrations or doing anything but repeating the same damn day over and over again, we may be able to come back refreshed. But we can’t. So we don’t. And we’re slowly but surely turning into a bunch of assholes, sniping at each other over nothing.

  I don’t know whether it’s easier for the guys or for me. They don’t have my psi-bility to worry about. On the one hand, they don’t experience each other’s feelings as intensely as I do. I can’t help that; their moods are so extreme that I can’t shield from them and keep my psi-bility working at the same time. I feel all their stress and their irritations and their fear and their despair and their rage. The constant negativity is wearing me down. On the other hand, when one of them has a pop at me, I can’t help being aware of what’s behind that. It’s hard to be angry at someone when you know how badly they’re hurting. Being more aware of their moods is making me better able to tolerate their behaviors. It all still sucks, though.

  Unless something changes and changes fast, at some point all the rage and frustration we’re accumulating is going to blow up. I don’t know how that will look, but I don’t wanna be there when it happens.