Heinlein's Finches

by Robin Banks

  “Are you seriously coming at me with some kind of Old Terran Traditionalist crap about man’s role…”

  Asher cuts in. “I said ‘person’ and I meant ‘person’. Tell me you wouldn’t feel the same. Tell me you’d be ok not having any ability or power to affect my safety, and then becoming a drain on everyone’s resources. Tell me you’d be ok watching someone trying to kill me right in front of you and not being able to do anything.”

  “But this is temporary! And it’s my fault! The medics say that your improvements are fine. Normal. There’s no reason to think you won’t get back to normal.”

  “And even if I got better, even if I were to become twice as strong and fast as before, I still couldn't do a damn thing to make you safe. Nobody can but you. You need to realize how ridiculous your situation is. You need to start making rational calls about it.”

  “So I’m irrational now?” Gwen’s voice is cold.

  “You’re being a sitting target. By choice. I don’t call that rational.”

  “And enlisting in the Patrol is? Going to war for them?”

  “This isn’t about me!”

  “No, of course it isn’t. It’s ok for you to make certain choices. It’s completely different when I do it.”

  “Gwen, you’ve been risking your life for months to make a point. I’ve sat here watching you risk your life, not being able to do a thing about it.”

  “So I’m careless and you’re useless. Is this your summary?”

  “Thank you for putting it so bluntly. Nice to know we’re on the same page.”

  “I’m not saying that! You’re saying that!”

  “If I’m wrong, tell me how. I can’t help you. I can’t help myself. I can’t help anyone. You won’t help yourself. This place isn’t safe for you; that’s been amply demonstrated. It’s becoming increasingly unsafe for those around you.” Gwen blanches at that. “You may be happy with that. I’m not.”

  “Of course I’m not happy with that! But I just don’t know what to do! Do you want me to go off on a tube, on my own? To quit and take up farming, leave you behind?”

  “That might not be a bad idea. Either of them, really.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t go anywhere with me. I’m stuck here for the foreseeable future. So if you want to go anywhere, you’ll have to go without me. If you won’t go because of me, then I have to take myself out of the equation. You’re not giving me any other options.” His voice has lost all its anger now. It’s cold and distant, but I can feel the rising terror within him.

  “Everything seems to go back to you wanting to split.”

  “I don’t want to split. But I don’t want you to stay here for me and die.”

  “I’m not staying here for you. I’m staying here with you.”

  “Well, then maybe it’s time for me to not stay here with you. Whatever it takes to make you snap out of this.”

  While they were arguing, we’ve arrived at the bottom of the tower.

  “And I can’t talk you out of this.”

  “Not this time. Not again. You have to choose.”

  Marcus clears his throat. “Professors, if I may… it would be safer to carry out this conversation indoors.”

  They both turn towards him, turning their anguish into a rage they can vent. “Shut the fuck up.” “Will you stay the hell out of this while I talk to my wife?”

  Marcus pulls a face and retreats. “I will leave you to your private conversation. I’ll be upstairs ready to catch Professor McGee.” He runs into the tower. I can hear him taking the steps two at a time. I’m not surprised.

  Asher lifts himself out of the ATR and into his climbing harness.

  “I don’t want to leave you. I love you. I want to be with you. But not like this.”

  “So you’re placing conditions on our relationship now?”

  “Yes. Reasonable conditions, I think. Don’t make me watch you die. Don’t make me the reason you let someone kill you.” I don’t know how he’s managing to secure himself into his harness, his hands are shaking so badly. “It’s your call. It’s always been your call. You’ve always been the stronger one. You’ve always had me by the heartstrings. Now I have to be the brave one, for a change. But it’s your call.”

  He looks at her with a terrified, bereft, angry stare, then he hauls himself up the wall. Gwen seems transfixed with horror, just staring at him climbing up hand over hand. He’s level with the fifth floor when our window opens. But the head that emerges isn’t Marcus’.

  The voice behind me is rasping and gleeful. The contrast sends a chill down my spine.

  “Our guy at the top has an arc knife. If you make a single wrong move, he will cut the cable, and your precious husband will come down like a stone.” He giggles. “Can you imagine a fall from that height on broken legs? Mind you, he might land right this time. The last one didn’t teach him any lessons”

  Another man emerges from the darkness at the base of the tower in front of us. I can’t see him clearly, just his murky outline in the dark.

  Something prods me in the back. “Kneel down and put your hands behind your back. If you move, he comes down.”

  I’m frozen and I can’t think and I don’t know what to do.

  Gwen whispers sharply at me. “Do it. Do what they say.” I kneel on the cobbles and put my arms behind me. I feel a tie slip around them and tighten. I feel suddenly vulnerable, and that fills me with nausea. Then I feel an impact at the base of my skull, hard and sudden. I fall over, landing on my face, and my field of vision narrows, darkness rushing in from the sides, until all I can see is a single bright spot in front of me. But in that bright spot is Gwen’s face, looking terrified, so I put everything I’ve got into holding onto it, and slowly the darkness stops pushing against it, and then backs off. I can’t see clearly, everything blurred and dancing, but I did not pass out.

  The man in the shadow starts to walk towards the light, towards Gwen. My eyes aren’t obeying me but I can see a chinless face, a shock of blond hair, little piggy eyes and the ugliest smile I’ve ever seen. I realize that I know him. He’s one of the cadets. I’ve seen him around plenty, but I’ve never seen him wear that expression.

  “You think you’re clever, right, getting all these men to run around for you. Getting those damn things on your wrists. You think you’re untouchable. We’re here to show you that you’re wrong.” He’s walking towards her slowly, with that horrific smile. The man who hit me walks a few steps past me, towards her. They’re cornering her, the wall of the tower at her back.

  “You just don’t listen and learn, do you? You don’t know what’s good for you. Now it’s going to cost you. Take off the dart guns.” Gwen doesn’t move. “Take them off, or I’ll yell to our guy to cut the rope.”

  Gwen snaps out of her freeze then. She starts to fumble around the straps, her fingers not working, then takes a deep breath, holds it, lets it out, and manages to undo the buckles. The dart guns fall clattering to the floor.

  He suddenly starts running towards her. She shrieks and steps back, getting between the second guy and the wall until she’s on the other side of the tower where she trips and falls on her ass. The running man’s smile gets bigger, a gash in his face, as he launches towards her. She’s just getting up, low to the ground, when he reaches her then goes flying over and past her, landing with a thud. Between the darkness and my eyes not working, I can’t see what’s happening, but I hear horrified shrieks and a lot of wet noises. The other man quickly glances at me, then moves towards the tangle of limbs. They’ve stopped moving. As he leans towards them, an arm comes out of the heap, arc knife in hand, and slices at his lower leg. He goes down with a shriek that is quickly silenced when a body launches on top of him.

  Gwen gets up and off him, arc knife in hand. I never knew she carried. She moves towards the tower door and disappears inside. A minute later, I hear a scream from the top of the tower, then a wet, crunching noise at the bottom. A few minutes later Gwe
n comes up to me and cuts my tie. “You ok? Need help to get Asher up.” I try to run with her to the top of the tower, but I can only stumble. When I get there, she’s fumbling with the winch. I try to help, but I can’t.

  “I can’t get it unstuck. It’s jammed too tight. If I force it, there’s a chance I’ll break it.”

  “Lower window. Get him through there.”

  We open the fifth floor window. Asher is dangling just below and to the side of us, looking terrified. He starts to talk but Gwen silences him. “Not now. We’re ok. Getting you in.”

  Getting Asher the few feet to the windowsill is a nightmare. There are no hand holds for him to grip. We don’t know if the winch will take his weigh. I try to grab the cable and haul him towards us, but my body does not obey me and leaning out of the window is making me sick. The cable cuts into my hands and rips my skin off. Somehow we manage it, and as soon as he can reach the sill he grabs hold and lifts himself up. Gwen and I grab him and yank his body through. His casts bang into the wall, and he muffles a scream of pain. Eventually we all end up on the floor under the window, breathing heavily and shaking.

  “What the hell?” I look at Gwen’s face, and her mouth is dripping with blood. She tries to wipe it off with a sleeve.

  “Not mine. It’s ok.” I spot the arc knife on the floor next to her, dripping with blood too. She looks at it as if she didn’t know it was there and kicks it away.

  “What the fuck happened?” gasps Asher.

  “Ambush attack. Two guys downstairs. One up top. Jammed the winch, said they would cut the cable, knocked her out, tried to take me out.”

  Gwen is nodding to herself as she talks as if she was explaining the events to herself as much as to him. Then her face breaks, her eyes unnaturally large. Her breath gets ragged and irregular. Her whole body is twitching and shaking. “I’m going to be sick.”

  I beat her to it. My head feels like it’s bigger on the inside than the outside. The light in the room is stabbing my eyes. I touch the base of my skull and find a soft, large lump the size of my fist. When I touch it, the pain twists my stomach. My hand comes back covered in blood. I manage to turn sideways before hurling. The spasms make my head hurt more.

  Asher crawls towards me. “Look at me.” He grabs my face in his hands and stares into my eyes. I want to cry, but I don’t want to cry in front of him. He gently moves my head sideways and twists it. I whimper in pain, so he stops and gently touches my neck. That makes me whimper, too.

  “Can you follow my finger with your eyes?”

  I try, but my eyes aren’t listening to me, and trying to focus makes me hurl again. Asher turns to Gwen.

  “Concussion, for sure. Maybe worse. And a bad cut. She needs a medic as soon as possible. Are you ok?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t just say it. Have you checked yourself?”

  Gwen just stares at him.

  “Come here.”

  He pats her up one leg, down the other, then up her body. When he touches her left arm, she yelps. There is a scorched gash in her sleeve, and an arc knife slash underneath it. The arc knife is an odd tool. It will go through most substances, eventually, without losing its edge. Through flesh, it cauterizes as it cuts. Gwen’s arm isn’t bleeding, but it looks awful.

  “Can you move your fingers? Slowly.”

  Gwen cries out.

  “You need a medic. Right now. Can you get yourself to the med bay?”

  “I’m not leaving you” Gwen shakes her head in panic. “I’m not. They were going to drop you. There might be more.”

  “Gwen, you need a medic. She needs a medic. She could be badly hurt. She is badly hurt, but it could be serious. She needs help and she can’t go on her own. I can’t come with you. I’m fine here. You get help, come back, get me. Or you send someone to get me. But you have to go now.”

  Gwen starts sobbing, completely hysterical. “I’m not leaving you here alone!”

  “Ok. Where is Marcus?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t be far, if he’s alive. Find Marcus. He can stay with me while you get help.”

  Gwen stumbles out of the room, then turns back to look at Asher questioningly, and he answers her unspoken question. “Try up first?” She disappears up the staircase.

  Asher turns to me. “Are you ok? You need to walk to the med bay. You need to do that. You’ll be fine once you get there. Ok?”

  I try to nod, but that sends the room swimming. I close my eyes. “Yes, I’ll be ok. Just a bump.”

  He strokes my face. “That’s the ticket. You’ll be ok soon. You did good.”

  “I did nothing.” I try not to cry, but the tears are burning too hot in my eyes. “He tied me up and hit me and I saw Gwen…” and I can’t make the words come out. Instead, this inarticulate sound comes out. I want to stop it but I can’t. Asher holds me.

  “Shh. You need to stay calm. You have to stay calm for Gwen now, ok? Can you breathe? Remember?”

  He gets me through one breath cycle. I do the second on my own. By the fourth, I feel terrible, but manageably so. I have to stay calm for Gwen now.

  I hear a thumping noise coming down the stairs. Gwen rushes into the room, Marcus at her heels looking dazed and angry, like a small child who’s just been woken up.

  “Found him tied up upstairs. Are you ok?”

  “I’m fine. You have to go to the med bay now. You take care of each other, ok? You go slowly. If you find anyone you know, you get them to help you. I’ll get there as soon as I can. You go now.”

  I get up. For a moment, the room spins around me, but I close my eyes and grab the wall until it passes.

  “Careful down the stairs. Go slowly.”

  We start to stumble down. Gwen is in front of me, so I have to be careful I don’t fall and land on her. She keeps looking back, I’m not sure if at me or at where she left Asher. We’ve just reached the bottom of the tower when she stops dead. I can see the vague silhouettes of heaps on the ground. I smell blood. If I think about it, I’ll pass out.

  I nudge her. “You heard Asher. Med bay.”

  She’s startled back into movement. We enter the main building and make our way down the hallway. The med bay is near the refectory, on the opposite side of the campus from the tower. We could cut across the courtyard, but the outside doors should be locked at this hour. Also, I need walls to hold on to.

  We’ve nearly reached the first corner when I feel it, so strong it stops me in my tracks. Asher is hurt. Hurt bad. Gwen turns to ask me why I’ve stopped, then sees my face. When I turn to run back, she runs with me. We race out of the corridor then stumble up the tower. When we get into the room, I am expecting to see blood and gore but Asher’s just sitting there, apparently intact, his mind screaming in pain. Marcus is standing a little way away, talking to him. I catch “… and once again you nearly get her killed…” before Gwen’s fist collides with his face. I’ve never seen someone run and punch at the same time. It’s quite spectacular, her outstretched arm catching him on the point of the chin just as he’s turned to see what the stampede was, the force of her momentum and swing combined, his perfect jaw moving sideways in his perfect face, and then his body following in a graceful spiral.

  Gwen doesn’t even look at him landing on the floor. She runs past him and straight to Asher. She skids to a halt in front of him, on her knees. She tries to make eye contact with him, but he’s eluding her gaze. His eyes look so wild I’m not sure he could focus, anyway.

  “Love? My love?”

  I stand there limply, not sure of what I’m looking at, but sure that it’s all wrong.

  Asher is wrong. He feels wrong, all sudden bursts of blind panic and crushing anguish and self-hatred. His face looks wrong. He’s holding himself as if he were shielding a horrible injury. I keep looking at him to try and find the source of this evisceration, but on the outside he looks fine. Gwen tries to stroke his face, but he recoils from her.

  Marcus is unfolding from the fl
oor, clutching his jaw. Gwen speaks to him without turning around, her voice cold and hard. “Go. Now. If I ever see you near him again, I will kill you.”

  “You know it’s the truth,” he mumbles wetly. “You are risking your life for a broken wreck who will never be the man he ought to be.”

  Asher flinches visibly, and Gwen spins to face Marcus, holding the still-wet arc knife. “Carry on. Please. Make it work the trouble.”

  Marcus gets up hurriedly and stumbles out of the room and down the stairs. I follow him. I’m not sure why. I can’t understand what’s happening.

  When we reach the bottom of the stairs, he turns to face me. “And as for you,” he hisses to me, voice dripping with venom, naked disgust in his eyes, “you know you’re just their little toy, right? Their little domesticated freak. A kink to add spice to their sex life, a third wheel to hold up their mess of a marriage. They’ve never wanted anything from you beyond what they needed to survive. They don’t like you any better than anyone else does, and nobody likes you.”

  I’m frozen in shock. I didn’t think much of the guy, but I hadn’t even imagined this side of him could exist. “You’re trying to hurt me. I’ve never done anything bad to you, but you’re trying to hurt me. You’re an asshole. I was wrong about you. I hope Gwen does kill you.”

  I feel bad for saying that, but not that bad. He stares at me as if shocked at my response, then stumbles off.

  I stumble back up the stairs towards the guys. Asher still feels wrong. Gwen is rifling through his med pack. “Ok, love, I’m just going to give you a little something to take the edge off now. You stay still, ok? Better soon.” He looks at her in confusion, blind panic still erupting from him, until she jabs him with a syringe and he slips into sleep.