A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “And the third?”

  “The third? Oh. Right, the third. My father likes you. My father and I have . . . our differences. But one thing he’s very good at is telling the sheep from the goats, or in this case the sheep dogs from the wolves. He likes you. He says—” He shook his head. “Never mind. He likes you. And because he likes you, I assume you’re a worthwhile human being.”

  “I’m glad—” I started intending to say that I was glad Sam Remy liked me, but I didn’t think he knew the half of it. He might or might not know what his brother and I had been up to, but he wouldn’t know, couldn’t know how Ben had died. Not if he liked me still. And besides, Sam couldn’t possibly know me. He’d known twenty-two-year-old me, but there had been so many years since. That pampered princeling was as dead as Ben.

  But I didn’t say anything because there was a knock on the door, and one of the younger servants that I didn’t know came in with a curly-haired golden setter by his side. He looked so much like Bonnie, which my mother had got me, and which my father had got rid of when I was ten, that I couldn’t help smiling. Seeing Nat, Goldie came into the room, tail wagging, and put his head on Nat’s lap. Nat patted him and told him, “Sit. Sit, sir,” while I nodded at the servant to leave.

  I don’t know how well-trained Goldie was. My own experience with setters tended to make me think they were the dumb blondes of the canine world, and all the training in the world might as well fly in and out through their ears. But he ignored Nat’s order to sit, and instead turned towards me. The tail that had wagged madly went between the legs, and the ears went back. The defensive-aggressive posture of a dog facing someone he thinks is going to kick him. Great. Even dogs hated me.

  But Nat scratched at the base of the dog’s ears. “It’s all right Goldie. He’s ugly, but he doesn’t bite.” A quick glance at me and he started to rise. “I’ll take Goldie to my father, shall I? One of my brothers can—”

  I dropped into a squat, so I wasn’t looming over the dog. I was still much larger than him, of course. “Come here, Goldie. Come here, boy.”

  Goldie hesitated half a second, then seemed to decide I was safe. His tail started again, and he rushed to me, ears flying. Moments later, I was fighting to make him stop licking my face, exerting pressure on his hindquarters to make him sit, and Nat had forgotten to smoke, and was holding his cigarette in what seemed to be nerveless fingers, while the ash grew long.

  I managed to make Goldie sit, and stood up, leaning a little to scratch his ears. “There boy, I’ve already washed my face. Nat, I’d appreciate it if you shook that ash off before it falls and burns the carpet.” And, as he obeyed, reflexively, I cast a disgusted look at the carpet. “Not that this is worth saving. I swear it looks like my father’s stuff. If this was Max’s taste I don’t think highly of it. I wonder where my furniture is. You said they never throw anything away.”

  “It must be your voice,” Nat said, looking at Goldie and me. Goldie was now leaning on my leg. “Or perhaps your smell. You are wearing Max’s clothes.”

  “Uh?”

  “Goldie,” he said. “I’ll explain. After . . . when they bring dinner.”

  Which they did immediately, wheeling in a table, with tablecloth and all, and a serving cart. It was a regular procession that came into my room. I’d had dinner brought to my room before, sometimes to share with Ben, but I’d never had this type of thing. Usually our dinners came on a large tray. I guessed it was different when you were the Good Man.

  In the lead, two servants pushed a wheeled table, with white tablecloth. Following them were two servants, one carrying two branched candlesticks with candles—candles?—and the other carrying a tray with plates, glassware and silverware. Following them came two more servants wheeling a multi-tier serving cart, of the kind that has surfaces to keep food cold and surfaces to keep food hot, and which contained more covered trays, platters of fruit and vegetables, tastefully arranged cheese plates and silver trays with dainties than would feed a family of ten for three days. And following those were other, uniformed servants carrying two chairs.

  Before I could blink, the table was set by the window, the candles burning, the lights dimmed—did they think this was a romantic assignation? Had rumors of my misdeeds preceded me? No. It was just that my father probably only had dinner for two in this room when it was an assignation—plates and silverware in place, the serving cart disposed nearby, and a servant disposed behind each chair, waiting to serve us. That wouldn’t do, not if I wanted Nat to talk. And Nat wanted to talk. I could see it in his eyes. And frankly, I needed him to talk, if I was going to stay alive in this brave new world.

  I gestured for the servants to leave. They hesitated. “Do leave,” I said. “We’ll serve ourselves. We’re competent enough for that.”

  They left, looking like I’d broken their toys. If I didn’t need to talk privately with Nat I’d let them stay, just to avoid the whipped puppy look in their eyes. I locked the door behind them. When I turned back, Nat was sitting on a chair by the table, smoking. He’d brought his improvised ashtray with him, and he was looking indefinably amused, in a way I couldn’t pinpoint.

  “Something funny, Nathaniel Remy?” I asked.

  He shook his head, then looked like he was going to brave himself for a plunge. “Oh, hell, I doubt you’ll believe it, but some of them are going to think—that is—”

  I sighed. This would come up sooner of later. “I believe it. Some of the older ones know that your uncle Benjamin Remy and I were . . . more than friends, and they’ll make a lot of very silly inferences, yes. Not our fault, and we can’t help it. I’m sure they’ll get over it.”

  He looked surprised. “Uncle Benjamin? Well, hell.” And resumed smoking.

  So, that wasn’t what he’d meant. Which, I suppose, meant that he was amused that they thought we were conspiring. “Well, I suppose we are conspiring,” I said. I got up and went over to the buffet and lifted the lids over several hot dishes. “Do you eat soup? Seems to be seafood soup, though of course it could be just algae and smell. But no, wait, I’m the Good Man and . . . yes, there is a shrimp in there. Presumably more too. It’s good to see shrimp. It’s been years.”

  “I’m not really hungry,” he said. “I—”

  I didn’t really care what he felt. He might not feel hungry, but he’d need the calories and the warmth after that midair fight. I’d already filled two bowls, and before he could enlarge on how he didn’t feel hungry at all, and could surely survive on air and nerves with the occasional lungful of nicotine, I’d set a bowl in front of him, and another at my place. I was back at the buffet, selecting one of the white wines offered and opening it, before he said, in a waspish tone, “You really are very determined.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you don’t listen well,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed, affably, as I poured a glass of wine for him and one for me.

  He quirked an eyebrow at me, but picked up his glass of wine and took a sip. Goldie was going between our chairs, thumping his tail with lethal force against our legs. “In fact, you’re all-around a pain in the neck, aren’t you?” he said.

  “My father thought so,” I said. “So much so he put me away for fifteen years. And Javier, today, said that I just wouldn’t die. Which I suppose is true, but not for lack of trying.”

  The half-amused expression went from his gaze. He sat up straighter. He took a sip of his wine, looking at me the whole while with those cool, speculative eyes. It was odd enough for him to have dark-dark eyes, when he was that pale a blond. But his eyes, unlike Ben’s which had been the same color, looked almost unreflective, swallowing the light and giving nothing back.

  “None of it was your fault, you know?”

  “Beg your pardon? What wasn’t my fault? My not being able to kill myself?”

  He shook his head, then took a spoonful of the soup, looked surprised and took another. “That too,” he said, after that second spoonful, his spoon suspen
ded between bowl and mouth. “I suppose that too, since being yourself, you probably put in a very good effort. But I didn’t mean that. I meant everything that’s happened to you.” He set his spoon by the side of his bowl, on his plate. “I’ll tell you what I know of your history—what my father told me—shall I? Then you fill in the blanks. I’m sure there are blanks since he never told me that you and my uncle were . . . involved. Though he did tell me that you . . . Well, I’d told him what was happening. He suspected it, already, and he told me why you’d been set aside from the . . . Why you had been sent out of the way and kept alive. Awkward too, since he was talking to me, of all people.” He looked up and met what must be my baffled expression. “No, none of this will make sense, until I explain, but first of all—tell me why you were arrested, or at least how it happened.”

  I frowned at him. “I was in a broomer group—no surprise to you, I suppose?”

  He shook his head. Of course, he’d seen me on broomback, just as I’d seen him.

  “So,” I said. “Javier and Josia Bruno, and Hans Rainer and . . . oh, a dozen or so of us, plus any number of children of our upper servants. We weren’t very good broomers. I mean, not like the illegal broomers you read about. We didn’t rob any drug transports but once, though we did our share of drugs. We tended to buy them. And we didn’t get in many battles for territory because word had quietly got around about what we really were, and they were leaving us alone. But we had fun. We got away from the protocol and people watching us. I sold a lot of my jewelry to keep our lair in booze and narcs.” I shrugged. “We started when we were about fourteen.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Nat said, and there was a cigarette between his fingers. Before he could shake it to light, I said, “Eat.”

  His eyes widened, then the half smile came back. “Aye-aye, Patrician.”

  I glared. “Eat or I pour it over your head. I spent fifteen years eating mush. You’re not going to let good food go to waste.”

  His gaze shifted from amused to serious, again, and I thought I detected a glimmer of compassion in them. I didn’t want his pity. While he ate, I went on, “My friend Hans was odd, for about a year or so, before . . . and then he called me in the middle of the night. He said he was in trouble, and would Ben and I come out. He’d called other friends, too. He said he had to tell me something, but he could only tell me in person.

  “When we got there, he was . . .” I shrugged. “He was too emotional to speak. And when he did speak, it didn’t make any sense. He said we were all Mules, and I—” I shrugged. I remember we thought he was crazy, and we tried to calm him down. “We finally gave him a Morpheus injector to make him sleep. Without his expecting it, you know? We didn’t know what he was saying, and he sounded hysterical.” I paused. “And then we called his father.”

  “Oh my God,” Nat said. It sounded like a straight-out invocation of the divinity.

  “Quite,” I said. “I’ve worked out that was the wrong thing to do. I’ve lived with the guilt of it, the knowledge I betrayed my friend. I’ve figured I as good as murdered Hans. It’s been fifteen years, and I am not completely stupid. I can add ten and ten, if I remove my shoes and count carefully.” I took a deep draught of the wine, because I didn’t want to choke up as I told him about my downfall which was no more than deserved for what I’d done to Hans. I tried to keep it dry and short. “Next thing you knew, we were invaded by Scrubbers. Hans was shot through the heart immediately. The others . . . They died, one by one, and Scrubbers . . . You know what Scrubbers do to bodies to dispose of them?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, pushing his empty bowl of soup away. “And I suspect I don’t want to, not over a meal.”

  “No,” I said. “They tried to kill Ben too, but they’d have had to go through me for that. But then . . . But then Hans’s father and my father—” I took a deep breath and said, my voice still echoing the surprise I’d felt that night. “My father! I mean, I knew he didn’t like me, but— They came in, and they said that two perpetrators would do as well as one. And then . . . and then the seacities Peacekeepers came in, and they arrested Ben and me for Hans’s murder. And then . . .” I choked and had to stop and breath. “And then they took us before a panel of five Good Men and they threw us in jail.

  “And a year later they transferred me to Never-Never.”

  “Because you killed Uncle Benjamin,” Nat said, flatly. “Which I must say proves that whoever is cranking men’s fate up there has a hell of a sense of humor. Or was that also trumped up?”

  I shook my head and wished, just wished, I could conjure Ben’s ghost again as I had through my solitary days in the cell. “Not trumped up.” I shrugged. “They tortured him. They took him to a special cell and they tortured him. He should have died. I don’t know what they wanted to know. I broke into the cell to rescue him, but I couldn’t . . . He wouldn’t live. They were keeping him alive to torture him. I slit his throat.”

  “They didn’t want to know anything,” he said. “They were trying to get rid of him. I suspect he’d understood more of Hans’s story than you had, just didn’t know how to tell it to you. But he got some of it, at least, out through our network. And that—”

  “Your network?”

  Nat was rubbing the bridge of his nose again. “What do you think of subversive organizations?”

  “What? I’m rather fond of broomers. And I helped a Usaian kid escape Never-Never,” I said, half joking. “John Jefferson.”

  He looked, slowly, at me, with that kind of speculative look a mouse gives a defanged cat. “Let’s just say my Uncle Benjamin belonged to a secret organization. As I do. And he got something out on our network, though it fell short of the whole truth. Something must have leaked, or the message was intercepted. Not unusual in prisons for wardens to know the channels for secret messages. It was intercepted and read, probably. And then they knew he was dangerously close to the truth.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” I said. I felt curiously betrayed. We hadn’t had secrets from each other, had we?

  “He wouldn’t,” Nat said. “He thought it was dangerous knowledge. He was right. And so they goaded you to kill him, and then they put you in Never-Never for it.”

  “Yes,” I said, and felt tired and empty. There really was nothing more to say. They’d made me murder my best friend, the only person besides my mother and Max that I cared about at all in the whole world. “And they forced me to stay alive to feel the guilt.”

  He got up. “Eat your soup,” he said, and went over to the sideboard, and poked around in it, lifting lids and looking. I finished my soup, and he removed the bowl and set it to one side of the serving tray. In its place, he set a plate with a chicken breast and something green and leafy. He’d made a similar plate for himself, and when I looked enquiringly at him, he gave me his half-amused look again. “The reverse of a suicide pact, shall we try that? You eat, I eat. I haven’t eaten a full meal since—” He stopped as abruptly as if the words had been cut with a knife. “In the last two days. I haven’t eaten much of anything, in fact. When I’m smoking, it doesn’t seem to matter. And I was . . . Until you made me eat the stupid soup, I didn’t realize I was hungry.”

  “I wasn’t commenting on the food,” I said. “Just on you serving.”

  “Ah. That is a plan of mine,” he said. “I’m learning a second trade. In case, you know, they decide to kill all the lawyers.” He smiled a little. “You don’t have any idea, do you? Ah, well, the classics aren’t taught.”

  “Shakespeare,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “When I was in Never-Never,” I said, boldly. “Someone sent me a gem reader inside a food can. Nothing fancy, mind you. One of the cheap disposable ones. I made it last fourteen years. And they sent me gems. Mostly history. I bet you I know more about the non-mythical USA than anyone alive. Well, most people alive. Someone sent me caches of documents everyone else thinks are lost forever.” I paused. “Weirdly, a lot of it has echoes o
f the myths of the Usaians, from what I can tell. Liberty and justice for all.” I shook my head at the sheer unlikelihood of it. “And there was music and literature and art appreciation.” I made a face at him. “I’m probably educated at dangerous levels.”

  He had narrowed his eyes. “I would bet you are,” he said softly. He seemed to be making calculations in his head, and I was suddenly uncomfortable. “I think I know where those gems came from.” I looked alarmed. “Please. Trust me that it would be the last thing I’d dream of, to turn the person in.”

  “The gems kept me sane,” I said.

  Again the quirked eyebrow, and I couldn’t tell if he was baiting me. All he said was, “I’m glad.” He cut a piece of his chicken with the kind of careless precision of someone who learned his table manners before he learned to walk. Ate it. Took a sip of his wine, and said, “Now eat. Let me tell you why you were framed for murder and put away, why my uncle Benjamin was killed, and why they forced your hand to kill him. Why they wouldn’t let you kill yourself in Never-Never and why . . . And everything.” He paused to eat some of the green vegetables. “Please, listen to what I tell you before you question it. I’m not insane, though sometimes I’ve wished I was. No, Goldie, down.” He sighed as the dog put his paws on his knee to beg food.

  “You talk,” I said. “I’ll make him a plate.”

  “It’s not good for him to eat people food.”

  “Yeah, probably not, but can you blame him for being jealous we’re eating and not giving him any?” I went to the serving cart and started making a plate with meats, trying to pick the ones with least spices.

  Behind me, Nat said in a distant, cold voice, “For me it started when your father died.”

  Familiar Strangers

  “Or rather,” he said. “We thought he had died. He’d been on a trip to Circum with your—with Max, and when the space cruiser, which they’d borrowed from Good Man Sinistra landed, we were told he had died en route, and that Max was in shock.”