She smiled. “He probably would. We’re terrible hosts, aren’t we? But this was the only quiet guest room we had. The others are near the kids’ rooms. Mind you, I’m not saying you won’t get them all up here, sooner than later. Well, all except Jane, who is sixteen and thinks she’s too big for hero worship. But the others have heard. And . . . well . . .” She blushed. “They’re boys, now. And we’ve all seen the holo, of course. And the boys especially . . . Well, you know what boys are like with heroes. So, if they get too bothersome, just have Nat swat them and send them back down the stairs where they belong. But here is the only place away enough they won’t be on you all day long.”
Nat got the pillows and they arranged me half-sitting, and really, I thought Mrs. Long was going to kiss me on the forehead. The pillows smelled of herbs. Weirdly, as embarrassed as I was, I didn’t feel uncomfortable, not as such. Of course, I did have a few questions, but I was reserving those for when I was alone with Nat.
Mrs. Long’s idea of a light snack consisted of a good half loaf of bread, butter and something that Nat said was apple butter—it did taste like apples, at any rate—a pear sliced in neat quarters, as though she were afraid I’d not have the strength to bite into the whole thing, and a glass of milk. Fortunately I discovered I was ravenously hungry just smelling it, hungry enough to fight tiredness, and was trying to spread the apple butter stuff on a slice of bread, with marked lack of success due to my half-reclined posture, until Nat came over. “Here’s an idea,” he said. “Assembly line. I assemble the food, you convey it to face.”
Mrs. Long smiled and said, “I’ll leave you gentlemen then. If you need anything, don’t forget to holler. Dinner will be ready in an hour and a bit. Will you be coming down, Nat, or should I send up a tray for two?”
I opened my mouth to tell them I could eat alone, but Nat didn’t have his mouth full of bread and apple butter, and said, “A tray for two would be nice, Mrs. Long. I have to make sure he doesn’t fall asleep and drown in the soup or something.”
She was gone before I could protest. And when I managed, “Drown in the soup, really!” after she’d left, Nat just smiled and said, “You probably would, you know? You keep nodding off. I don’t think you’re even aware of it. And she’ll bring you enough soup to drown in.”
He’d buttered or apple-buttered all the slices of bread and now stepped away and lit a cigarette. I talked to his back, “Holo? What holo did they see?”
He turned around and did his best to show me two empty hands, in a gesture of non-aggression. It wasn’t quite right because a hand was holding a cigarette, but I’d give him A for effort. “Not my fault,” he said. “Security holo. I told them you wouldn’t like it, but Mother said . . .” He trailed off. “Well, never mind, but the thing is, she thought it would be good . . . well . . . for your image, and so she passed off copies into the auxiliary core with you know, do not for the love of heaven copy and distribute. I don’t think there’s a single Usaian household that doesn’t have at least a copy by now, and I’m sure a lot of other people do too.”
“Mother said?”
“I knew you wouldn’t let that go. You really have a rare ability to fasten on the one thing of all I most don’t want you to pay attention to.” He looked suddenly grave. “Look, you’re not a child, and you’re not stupid. You know that part of our work is turning people against the Good Men. We just don’t want you to get swallowed up in it, should . . . well, when things get ugly, all right? We want people to know you’re not like them and you’ve fought against them. Sorry if that meant violating your privacy a little, but we want it imprinted on the public consciousness, that all the bastards might deserve to die, except Lucius Keeva. Do you understand?”
I sighed. “I understand. I don’t have to like it, do I?”
He gave one of his cough-chuckles. “I don’t particularly like it. Remember, in this hero-holo, I got to play a slab of meat thrown over your shoulder, and the parts of me that were recognizably human aren’t parts I normally wish to flash in front of all the Daughters of the Revolution. But I do see the need for it.”
I was mulling over everything he said, while I ate and drank my milk. I didn’t remember drinking milk straight since I was about five, but this tasted good. All of it tasted good, making me feel, once more, I’d got somewhere beyond my normal state of life. “Are you afraid of new turmoils?” I said.
He shrugged. “Luce, I’m not a strategist. I’m barely a good underling with enough executive capacity to know how to minimally improve on or change orders. My father is the genius. But I think that it’s quite possible we’re trying to create turmoils. There is a great deal of fear of biogen and of the Mules. Strangely, the Good Men have used that fear to keep themselves in power. I think it might be related to their real loathing for their congeners who— Never mind. You don’t want my own explanations and rationalizations. Suffice it to say that it’s much easier to manipulate people based on their fears and their hatreds than on their reason and their desire for liberty. The Good Men have kept the Earth in miserable subjugation, but it’s been a predictable subjugation, where nothing much changes and where there’s a path to doing pretty well for yourself and your children, given a willingness to jump through hoops and some conformism. But for most people—unless they were at the wrong end of one of the engineered plagues or famines—it’s been a pretty comfortable life. Comfortable people don’t rebel.”
He got up, lit a cigarette and started pacing. I’d come to know Nat well enough to realize when he paced he was trying to reach some conclusion in his mind, trying to make sense of something. I started nibbling on the pear while he spoke. “It’s always been more uncomfortable for people like us, of course,” and then making it clear he wasn’t talking about just Usaians. “But then it’s always been more uncomfortable for people like us, except maybe in ancient Greece and places like that, though even there I wonder.” He paused. “And not just people like us in the sense that . . .” He floundered. I realized that Nat simply didn’t like to speak of private matters, not even to people he trusted. I also realized he trusted me, and felt a sudden warm glow about it. “In the sense that we are attracted to the same gender, and most people aren’t. I mean the regime of the Good Men, like most dictatorial regimes that rely—they have to—on controlled scarcity and controlled conformity, are hell for all the outliers the . . . the people who don’t quite fit in: eccentrics, oddities, people who think differently, people who are smarter or dumber than the rest.
“What has always puzzled me about history is that all those people, yeah, and people like us too, seem to support the tyrannies. Every tyranny that comes along.
“I think it’s because, at heart, we want to belong. All humans, I mean. And we oddlings think that in a dictatorship we’ll have to belong. People will be forced to accept us. But the thing is that any regime where power is centralized is a regime where conformity is enforced, any dictatorship, any government strong enough to enforce anything is a disaster for us. For all the odd people. We can be silenced, put out of the way, killed. That is always there, hanging over us. On the other hand, I think it is part of the attraction of dictatorships for . . . well . . . for people who are normal enough to fit into the designation of average.”
I almost choked on my bit of pear. I’ve said I am by nature paranoid, right? Not that paranoid. “Nat! That’s not true. Your father . . . I’m sure your father . . . I mean, he knew about Ben and me, and I don’t think he ever felt we should be put to death. And as for—”
“Oh, please. My father is no more average than we are, though his oddity is of a different kind. But I didn’t mean that average people want to kill those people they personally know who are . . . a little different. No. Most people will have some exception of the sort that goes he’s a little funny, but he’s one of ours. But that’s the thing, see, humans are by nature tribal. Blame what we come from, apes who, like you, had a tendency to overthink everything—” He gave me a challenging look,
but I let it pass and he went on. “Awful materials to make us out of, and one wonders what God was thinking, only of course, perhaps it was the best choice, awful though it was. These are tribal creatures, creatures of the band. And we are too. And that means that anyone who sticks out too far hurts tribe cohesion and, unless linked to us pretty closely, arouses the need to stop them. I think the Good Men, not just by killing people like us and . . . other eccentrics, because they don’t kill enough of us to make a difference, but by forcing us to go underground and not show our strangeness, contribute to most people feeling safer, feeling better. That’s not the way to get a revolution going. But showing the Good Men are the very thing they taught everyone to hate will get the revol— Luce, for the love of heaven!”
I thought he’d gone crazy, then I realized, somehow, I had milk all over my face and he was wiping at it with a napkin that had been in the tray. I’d fallen against the milk, knocking the glass over, then landing my face in it. Without waking.
“Not drown in the soup,” he said. “You were about to drown in the milk.” Then, more contritely. “I’m sorry. I’ve been boring you into sleep.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m just exhausted.”
“I know you are,” he said, still sounding guilty. He took the tray from my lap. “I’ll take this down, you rest.”
I think over the next week and a half that command was the thing I most heard from Nat, from Mrs. Long and from Mr. Long. I didn’t hear it from the kids, but that was only because none of the boys seemed to be able to speak in front of me. I’d wake up and they’d be gathered in a semicircle, staring at me as though I were a strange and wondrous object, and when I talked to them, I got open mouthed blank-eyed stares. Jane on the other hand, a more redheaded version of her mother and very pretty, would blush redder than her hair and more often than not hand me a cookie or a slice of cake—at a guess to keep me from talking to her.
But most of the time Nat and I were left to our own devices. Even Goldie deserted us, disappearing in the morning, and coming back at sunset, streaming mud or soaked in water or, on one occasion, covered in leaves and dirt. Nat would send him back down the stairs with “Not in that state, sir” then yell for one of the boys to wash him and dry him. Once, he’d explained to me, “He goes with the boys. Fishing or hunting or whatever they’re doing in late summer. He probably plays a hound of great valor or something like that in the kids’ games. And probably a pony for the younger ones.” And to what must have been my alarmed expression at the idea that the kids might abuse Goldie, he’d smiled. “Oh, I’ve never seen him this happy. I think we’ve been boring that dog, Luce.”
I don’t exactly know what Nat did during that time. I knew he was afraid to leave me alone, and much as I’d have liked to tell him he was wrong, the few times I’d tried to get up on my own in the first few days didn’t end well. Sometimes when I woke up from dozing, I found him using a reader. And one time, when he sat on my bed, smoking, his fingers were streaked with red and dark brown and green. In the confusion of trailing sleep, I’d reached for his fingers and made some sound of dismay, because I think I imagined he’d hurt himself. How that explained the green, I don’t know.
But he’d pulled his fingers out of my reach, looked at them and laughed. “Pastel, Lucius. Not some weird kind of green, alien blood. I was by the window, trying to get the landscape. A forlorn task. Strangely, the new fingers have to learn from scratch. Odd, isn’t it? The mind knows, but the body has to learn.”
That too was the theme of my second week in paradise. As I started being able to get on my feet without passing out from tiredness, I found that my left arm needed to be taught everything that it had known before. It did not move as precisely as it had. It was like my arm and my fingers had minds of their own. And yet, Nat remained incredibly patient. Even when I was fully walking and went downstairs, and strolled—slowly and in a measured way—around the farmyard, he accompanied me, like a shadow.
Towards the end of the second week, stung by my continued weakness, my inability to do the simplest things, annoyed at him for seeing it when I didn’t want to be a pampered princeling and I wanted to stand on my own two feet, I turned on him and told him a lot of foolish things, including, “You don’t have to shadow me. You’re not my nanny. And, damn you, I don’t want your gratitude.”
He’d looked shocked for a moment, I think not so much by what I’d said as by my rudeness. Nat was one of those people whom rudeness would always shock. He could understand violence and hatred, but not wanton nastiness in social intercourse. But once the shock passed, amusement lit up his dark eyes, and his lips tilted upward the slightest bit. “I’m not doing anything out of gratitude, Luce. If I were, I’d be kicking you in the shins when no one was looking. I don’t like being beholden. I don’t like doing things because I have to. I’m doing what I am because, annoying though you are, I’d feel bad if you fell and broke your head. I have a strong feeling that I’d feel saddened by it, and I hate to feel sad.” And thus, leaving me without any retort, he’d continued shadowing me.
By the third week I was fine, but he postponed our starting our work amid the locals with some mumbled excuse. In time I came to understand it was because he too needed some time to take a deep, relieved breath, in this case his relief coming from the fact that I was finally recovered and would not be impaired my whole life—something he didn’t tell me he and the medtechs feared but apparently they had.
That week was spent by him—in cabal with the Longs’ irredeemable offspring—in teaching me to fish, making me help to feed the chickens and muck out the pigs, picking of wild berries for preserving, and finally, taking me hunting.
“It’s a favor we do them,” Nat explained of the hunting. “And not just because it gets more meat in storage for the winter, but because deer run rampant around here and are a problem with the crops. Deer and wild pigs. Bear and wolves haven’t made it back, nearly as much. There were fewer of them, and they were more affected by the scarcity and the plagues-gone-wrong unleashed at the end of the twenty-first. So the pigs are the biggest predators—descended from what used to be farm pigs, but you’d never know it. And the deer are everywhere and by themselves are holding back the regreening of the continent.”
The regreening didn’t even surprise me or arouse my curiosity, until Nat and I did start on our mission for the cause, flying through primeval-looking forests, to find isolated farm families and sound them out on their opinions. Turned out we were a perfect team. Nat, carefully raised by a good and pious family, could put on his expression of concern, his best manners, and somehow look five inches shorter and five years younger and thoroughly inoffensive, even when asking people the most outrageously personal questions about their beliefs. And I could loom beside him, silent and vaguely threatening by reason of bulk alone, reminding them that anything they attempted against him wouldn’t end well.
I’d like to say my services in protecting him were needed very often, but the fact was that most of people we met were decent and kind and, even if most were not quite as materially well off as the Longs, they were good people. They received us with open arms, and talked with the free flowing talk of people who hadn’t seen strangers in a good long while and were starving for news of the outside world. And if some of them suspected we were a couple—some seemed to in the way they linked our destinies, by asking if we meant to clear a farm, the implication being we’d do it together—very few even raised eyebrows, much less saying anything ruder. And we met a few of our kind, too, none of whom seemed more or less accepted than anyone else around them. Or better or worse. In fact, the two times we got in serious trouble, one was when some older farmer took it into his head we were a danger to his daughter, and another when one of two men, more or less clearly a couple— Never mind. The situations never went beyond what could be managed by my pulling a burner and covering our retreat. There was never fire actually exchanged, and we stayed away from those two farms in the future.
&n
bsp; More often, we came home with jars of jam and invitations to us and the Longs to come to the next . . . whatever the popular local entertainment was, most of it self-staged, the Fall Dance, the Theater Performance, the Philosophical Debate. Yes, those were all more or less at the same level of providing amusement for the masses, which probably is a good snapshot of how isolated and bored these people were, even with holo recordings and other modern facilities. Because of the controls put on long distance communications, all the holo and general broadcast stations were where the transmission could be controlled by censors. There were none close enough to echo out here. Most broadcast didn’t reach this far, and most of them were starving for novelty. I attributed their strange hospitality to that.
“Partly,” Nat said. “But partly because the distance between farms encourages minding your own business, and the type of people who do well out here are . . . remember the outliers I talked about? People who don’t feel quite at home in society. Stands to reason. People don’t go out and start life again in what could be a dangerous environment unless they are truly unhappy where they are. So they tend to leave each other alone. But we are social animals, and so they have to socialize. The result is strict rules about hospitality and, well, a broad tolerance for those who are different, even the very different. Before you came, I met this old guy who lives with three pigs. All the pigs were a feral liter, raised from piglets. The weird thing was not that he didn’t eat them, or that he talked to them. No, the weird thing is that he thought they talked back. Worse, he seemed convinced they were related to him. One of the shoats wore an apron . . . But all his neighbors treated him and spoke of him as if he were only a little funny.”
As for the mission, it prospered. Most of the people this far out were either Usaians or readily willing to sympathize with the cause of getting rid of the Good Men. Most of them were willing to pledge entire cellar-fulls of preserved berries and bushels of dried deer meat to providing for the eventual troops. Not that this was universal. What Nat had said about oddities living around here, and the oddest ones were the ones who were vehement supporters of the Good Men and of genetic purity—whatever that might mean—and of order and stability.
A Few Good Men Page 32