A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  To him, too, Nat spoke a foreign language. Timing and units, and the charge rate of burners—all right, I suppose I understood that last one, but not in the context. At least Nat didn’t call him “Sir.”

  And Betsy was talking to the young man who was piloting the flyer, telling him where to approach and where to land, so we wouldn’t be detected.

  I shouldn’t have felt stung, but I did. Part of it, I think, is that over the last few months Nat and I had been practically inseparable and, probably because of my initial, greatly weakened condition, I’d felt as if I had if not all at least a great deal of his attention. And the other part was that I’d been very badly trained not to be the center of attention. Think about it. I’d been born as the son of the Good Man, the future heir. Even if things had, in fact, been quite different, and my chances of inheriting were zero, I didn’t know that, and neither did any of the people who interacted with me. Sam might have suspected that something was badly wrong, but he had no idea what. What that meant was that from the time I could toddle, every servant, every functionary, every cog in the machinery of the ultimately corrupt and dictatorial regime into which I’d been born, had been bent on ingratiating themselves on the person on whom, they thought, all their future chances depended.

  I’d never sought to be the center of attention, mind you, but I’d never thought to avoid it either. In that, Max might have been more self-aware, or at least more aware that his entire life shouldn’t be lived in the glare of the public eye. That this should have been the cause of his untimely death was a cosmic joke I wasn’t ready to unravel yet. As for me, even prison hadn’t brought home to me that the universe didn’t revolve around my grubby belly button. After all, in the jail to which Ben and I had been consigned, we’d been the most prominent prisoners—which was part of the reason he’d been the center of so much ill will. And I’d known, even then, that they attacked him because I was a little too prominent to be safe. And in solitary, I’d been the center of my own universe.

  Do me the justice of understanding I realized all this while sitting on the floor of that flyer, while Betsy sat next to the pilot, discussed landing plans, and occasionally calling someone on the link for the local conditions; and while Nat called two people, one of whom was totally unknown to me and discussed things that were utterly unintelligible to me. I realized it and accepted it, and it’s not as though I threw a big temper tantrum to pull the center of attention back to me. But Ben’s ghost—or my subconscious—had been correct. I was a pampered, self-centered princeling, and the awful recognition of this fact made me feel very small and insignificant and more than a little forlorn, as I sat there, quietly, while the people on whom this operation depended organized things.

  In the event I was about to discover I was not insignificant enough.

  We landed in the middle of the night, and I’m not precisely sure why. History books give several places, and when I asked Nat which one was the true one, he gave me one of his rare impatient answers, something about having been too worried about what they were about to do, too on edge, to pay any attention to that stuff, and now he couldn’t remember, and I should ask Betsy if it was all that important. But Betsy had also told me she couldn’t remember, so I have to assume that for whatever reason those two prefer to keep the place of our landing that night a secret. Don’t ask me whatever the reason. Perhaps they thought we might need a secret landing place again on the seacity of Olympus.

  At any rate, we landed in the dark, even our own lights out, and by instruments. As soon as we landed and the door flew open, three women and one man came in, all about Betsy’s age. At the same time, Nat was barking commands I couldn’t understand and sending the young men in the flyer out into the night in groups of six, while he stood by the door and gave them instructions in a clipped, fast tone that was impossible for me to follow, even had I the slightest idea what he was talking about. It was much like hearing a coach giving instructions to a team by referring to a play book. It was all about going to coordinates so and so and executing contingency xyl, unless the other side did vhx, in which case they were to default to mzy.

  He wasn’t smoking. It was the longest I’d seen him not smoke. He had a burner in each hand and two more burners shoved in holsters on a belt. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn all day out at the Longs’, a slightly more fitted grey tunic than it was his wont to wear, and a pair of perhaps much too fitted black pants with work boots that ended just below his knee. Somehow he made it look like a uniform. His features were disciplined, and I couldn’t imagine him displaying any emotion or giving one of his disconcerting bark-laughs.

  Well, I might be nearly useless, but there was one thing I could do. Given my fast-moving trick, and my ability to shoot fast and accurately, I could join one of those teams going out into the night. All right, so I had no idea what those oddly named plans were, but I was almost sure, given a little effort, I could follow and imitate the movements of some raw twenty-year-old who’d never seen combat except the play-fighting in the Longs farm.

  I got up, and as Nat called the last six young men, I joined them. Nat went into his rapid-fire instructions, then, suddenly, his gaze fell on me. You’d think it would have happened earlier, considering I towered over everyone else in the group. But he’d been looking from face to face, and suddenly his gaze hit my chest, and he tilted back his head to look me in the eye. You’d think I was a coiled rattler ready to strike. His brows rose, then came down, his eyes narrowed, and, suddenly, and to my complete surprise, all the weariness of the world fell on his features—like he’d been dealing with all the idiots of the world for all of eternity and now, at this moment, I was the embodiment of all of them. He told the boys to “Scram,” and then he looked up at me, as they jumped off the flyer and ran out into the night. “Lucius,” he said. “What in the name of the founders do you want?”

  “I can shoot,” I said. “I can join in. I can be useful.”

  His eyes widened. He said again, “Lucius,” in that tone that implied you subnormal twit, and this is an insult to subnormal twits everywhere. “My mother told you how you can be useful. They need you to address people. They need your voice and your image if possible to reach as many of those people as possible. You’ll be very useful. Without you none of this would work.”

  I shrugged impatiently. Yes, I had listened to the harebrained idea that because of that damn holo which the security cameras had taken from the prison, and the notoriety it had achieved amid our people I was a great propaganda weapon, and my opinions and my ideas could sway a majority of the seacity to our side. I thought Betsy’s idea of my influence were greatly exaggerated, if not completely wrong. But it was not something I was going to ask her about.

  “But I still see no reason I can’t take an active part first, before it is time to make the address, or whatever it is.”

  He shook his head, and managed to look as if I were even more subnormal than the subnormal twit he’d taken me for. “Look,” he said, “I don’t have time to explain things in words of more than one syllable, so I’m going to give you orders, and you are going to forgive me, Patrician. I’m going to tell you that, on penalty of losing not just my good opinion, but possibly my father’s life, you are to do absolutely what my mother tells you to do. You are not, under any circumstances, to expose yourself to danger. You are to behave like a mature adult on whom several lives depend, and not like a rash teenage boy out on a lark. Do you understand me?”

  I had it on the tip of my tongue to tell him exactly what I understood and what I thought of his high-handed approach besides. But just as I opened my mouth to speak, something in his eyes caught my gaze, and I realized I’d never seen Nat worried before. Not worried like this. And I couldn’t speak, beyond saying “yes.”

  I will still confess that if he had said “Yes, what?” and waited for me to call him “sir” or to speak in a more military manner, I would probably have decked him and ruined all our chances of winning that night
. Fortunately, he didn’t. He just raised his eyebrows at me, and sighed, then opened his mouth. Then closed it so suddenly the snap was audible, then looked . . . unreadable, and said, “Goodbye, Lucius. Stay safe.” And jumped off into the night.

  Leaving me in the hands of the Daughters of Liberty.

  Daughters of Liberty

  I didn’t leave the transport. Well, not till much later that night. Instead, more people came in, men and women, all in their middle years. Most of them ignored me, going to Betsy and getting instructions, then setting about inexplicable tasks. They brought in furniture, and curtains and things I had no idea of a use for, like an antique folding table, the top in polished walnut, which they sat in front of the curtains and a heavy, rather patriarchal-looking chair, much like the ones in my father’s office. Then, on the desk, they set a pile of gems, a gem reader of considerably better make than the one that had kept me sane in prison, and a signet ring. Make that my signet ring.

  After a while, when they started hooking up equipment around it, it occurred to me that they were setting up a makeshift broadcast studio. What was more, in accordance with Betsy’s idea that I should address the public, they’d set up the studio to look like a portion of my office at home, or at least what someone who had never been there might think was my office: nice furniture, symbols of power and all. I supposed the gem and the gem reader were supposed to look like I’d been hard at work . . . doing what? I presumed not reading novels. Perhaps reading reports of the situation.

  When a total stranger—male, as it happened—started removing my shirt, I balked, and I balked loudly enough that Betsy looked away from the three conversations she was carrying on and at me. I knew when she looked at me that she was going to take much the same attitude as Nat and tell me to stop making a fuss and allow myself to be dressed or undressed or made up like the puppet I was meant to be.

  To my surprise, she snapped out, “Royce, are you out of your mind? The Patrician can dress himself. Just give him the clothes you want him to wear.”

  Royce looked surprised. To be honest, he’d looked surprised at the idea that I could speak. It took me some weeks after that to realize that the holo of my exploits in freeing Nat had given everyone the idea that I was a big and inarticulate brute not at home in the world of ideas and speech.

  No. It wasn’t my exploits. It was my exploits combined with something long built into the human psyche, who knows why, that those who are big and strong and capable of feats of daring and strength must of necessity be stupid and slow of mind. How that myth had persisted in the face of all the brilliant giants and dim-witted small people who had graced the pages of history was inexplicable. The idea must serve some evolutionary purpose, so firmly was it planted in the minds of otherwise rational people.

  After the surprise passed, Royce handed me a black shirt and pants, in a material that felt like silk but was probably one of the more expensive synthetics. It looked, in fact, much like a few of the suits I’d left behind in my closet at home, and might be one of them. That he tried to explain to me how to put it on is something I will leave for a clinical psychologist to understand. I suspect if it weren’t for Betsy’s eyes on him, looking just faintly disapproving, he’d have followed me into the fresher to make sure I changed my clothes properly and didn’t, out of naivete or high spirits, put the pants on my head and the shirt on my legs.

  When I emerged, dressed, I had to balk again, this time at a relatively young woman—for this crowd; she must have been about thirty-five—who instructed me to sit down, not in the carefully set up studio, but in one of the other chairs, and then took my ponytail in her hand and said, “Royce? Do you know if we have a good barber among our people?”

  Betsy intervened on that too, not saying it, but making me feel like I was pulling her away from more important matters, by saying, “No. You can’t cut his hair. Yes, I know it would make him look more respectable, but you must leave him as looking as close as possible to how he did in the holo. Yes, I know he has been in the sun and looks far healthier, but that’s good. No one expects him to look as pale and ill as he did in that video, but you must, must leave him recognizable. Cut his hair and half the people are going to say he is a body-double, a lookalike pulled in for this stunt. And then all his value will be gone.”

  For a moment I felt as though Betsy felt that without my propaganda value I would mean nothing to her or her family, but then when Royce presumed to explain to me that we’d be using for the transmission an array of communication devices pulled from junked flyers, because “It doesn’t suit us, not yet at any rate, to have external enemies know there’s any dissension in the ranks, and if we broadcast in the normal way, we give them two advantages. First, they can interfere with it through the controls put into mass communications worldwide. And second, they will hear your transmission, which will have two down sides. The first is that it will let them know that we are fighting against ourselves, which of course will cause them to attack and obliterate us before we can collect ourselves. Second, it will make them realize you have strategic importance to us and increase the risk of a hit on you. Now, these broadcasting apparatus we’re using will transmit in all frequencies, because they were designed as emergency communication in case of a fly accident, so they will interrupt every link talk, break in on every broadcast. And we have enough of them set up in a relay that the effect will cover all of the seacity and a little of the sea area around, but not beyond. I don’t know if you understand—”

  “He understands, Royce, the idea came from a meeting with my son and the Patrician and their friends,” Betsy said, and looked at me, from across the room, giving me a sudden, warm feeling that I hadn’t fallen into some strange reality in which I wasn’t actually capable of thinking.

  Royce backtracked rapidly, apologizing if he’d offended me, and explaining he didn’t know I was an electronic communications expert. He looked, in fact, like I was a zoo animal, who all the keepers had thought was some form of bear, but who had suddenly grown a magnificent pair of antlers. Which, now that I thought of it, might be much more apt than I wanted to think about.

  Before the communication session started, and while the young woman who’d wanted to cut my hair put a reader with the speech I was supposed to give in front of me, so I could prepare myself in advance, Betsy leaned in to me and whispered, so only I could hear, “You don’t have to play the fool, Luce. They assume anyone who is new to the organization needs training wheels and knows nothing, not just of conspiracy but of the world. Feel free to put them in their place. It will do them good.”

  Then there was a lot of sitting around. Obviously we were waiting for a signal, and I tried not to think of Nat and those young men, out there, in the night, being shot at. I tried to remember that despite the fact that Nat had gotten caught by the enemy while out jogging—and, while I didn’t do him the injustice of thinking he’d been unarmed, probably under-armed—he was a capable man, and an able fighter. I’d seen him on broomback and had no reason to suspect he’d run screaming in the face of fire. On the contrary.

  But civil wars are always uncertain, and this was more than a civil war, a family squabble, amid members of a secretive organization that were, if not all related, at least all people who had lived for a long time in each other’s pockets and whose ancestors had lived in each other’s pockets. Such wars could quickly turn very uncertain indeed, like family squabbles in which sides change overnight, on the whim of a personal like or dislike.

  In my mind, I was minding the backs of each of those young men, worrying that our effort would fail, and worrying about Sam and James in their jail cell, hoping that they would be restored to freedom, hoping it would all work out, without even knowing the full details of the plan I wanted to work out.

  And then the signal came. Betsy’s link rang, and she answered, and Nat’s face appeared midair, in front of her, visible to me because she was standing by my side. “It’s ready, Mother,” he said. “Let her rip.” And t
hen he’d hesitated for just a moment and added, “Father and James are fine.” Then he vanished, and we were on.

  It shall count against me, if there ever is a final judgment in which hearts are weighed that I had a moment of dismay that Nat hadn’t said so much as “Good luck, Lucius.” Why he should say that, when all I had to do was make a speech was beyond me, but I still felt vaguely regretful he hadn’t done it. No. Vaguely slighted. Pampered princeling indeed.

  So instead of repining, I’d faced the pickup of the mechanism that had been rigged so you didn’t need to hold the button down and scream into it, as you normally had to do with an emergency broadcasting mechanism. And I’d spoken in the measured accents, the cultured tones I’d been taught to use. In that speech, I used the training my father had—often quite literally—drummed into me on how to behave like a model Good Man.

  Nat had told me, sometime while I was fighting my left arm and learning to have full control of it again, that my father’s training me to be a Good Man in demeanor, posture, speech and attitude was not an act of pointless cruelty. Like the training of my arm to function properly even though my mind remembered its functioning just fine, my father had meant to train me to behave like a Good Man, so that the muscles would remember; so that my face would hold the proper expression by training, so that my mouth would produce the proper sounds; so that my body would hold the proper posture.