Heinlein's Finches

by Robin Banks

  Aiden shrugs. “Yeah. Had to.”

  “…You didn’t, really. You could have married her and been rich and had actual meat to eat and dogs and fountains.”

  “Yeah. But it would have been wrong. Not fair on her. Have to speak up for those who can’t”.

  I can’t help blurting out “Dude, you hardly speak at all!”

  He shrugs again. “Words are hard. They can hurt people even when they work right. Engines are easy. They only hurt people when they go wrong. I always liked engines better. And not getting beaten up. Quiet life.”

  I can’t fit it all in my head. “But don’t you miss all of this, when you are crammed in a dorm and eating vat protein?”

  He shrugs. “Yeah. Every day. But overall? No. I got lucky. Father learnt from his father. My uncle went through bad times. Only got away by hiding, making himself insignificant. Mother drinks a lot. Haven’t seen her much. Never sober. My younger brother learnt from my father. Has a wife, kids. I pity them. My youngest brother killed himself. That was hard on us. Hardest on Martha, I think. She raised us.”

  “Gods, man, I’m sorry, I had no idea!” Asher blurts out.

  “Not supposed to. That was the idea. Fresh start. What I think now, maybe. If you guys want, we can all die. Be reborn. New identities. Get out of here. Can’t go back, anyway. Can’t stay here too long. Not safe for Uncle Charlie. Get our DNA on a ship, blow it up, start again. I can blow up a ship, no bother. Blowing up ships is easy.”

  “How would we get a ship?” Asher asks.

  “Buy it or steal it. Either way, I can blow it up.”

  “Funny you should say that. We have a plan. Kind of a plan, really. We need a tech, ideally. We were going to ask you.”

  “Yeah, be cool.” His face darkens “Got to tell Nick though.”

  “Tell him what?” Gwen asks.

  “Tell him we’re not dead. Not fair on him otherwise. When I died the last time, we couldn’t tell Martha. No chance to, and not safe. She’s no actor. She was so upset. Broken, really. Too much for her. Uncle got Father to send her here.” He shakes his head. “Not doing that to Nick. He’s my best friends. You guys are good to me. All of you. I know there are things I don’t do well. People things. I miss things, inside myself. Nick doesn’t care. Never has. He acts like it’s ok. Like I’m ok.”

  We all talk at the same time. “But you are ok!” “There’s nothing wrong with you!”

  Aiden shrugs. “There is, though. I know it, but I can’t fix it. It’s ok. Not a problem with friends. Good friends. Nick is my best friend. From day one. Not going off without telling him. Wouldn’t be fair.”

  Gwen sounds dismayed. “Well, I can’t disagree with that.”

  “I don’t think any of us could,” agrees Asher. “It will suck enough for enough people. Skip…”

  “Clint and Clarence!” I squeal. “Gods, we’ll be hurting a lot of people.”

  “Can’t tell everyone. Not safe. But if I come with, I want to tell Nick.”

  Gwen nods. “Yeah, same. Obviously. I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it sooner, really. How do we go about this?”

  “Nick is on the tube. We fly to the tube. If Nick wants to come, we take him. I don’t think he will. He loves teaching. But things have been bad. Anyway, we can ask. If he comes, we fake a crash on the way back. With him on board. All five. Short time frame, but doable.”

  “Time frame!” Asher exclaims. “I can’t fly yet.”

  “Not a problem for this flight. Clone some of you. Some of all of us. Pick you up on the way back. Stay here a while, leave with new identities when your legs are good. Dust will have settled.”

  Asher breathes deeply. “So you’d go up to the tube, security being as it is, find Nick without being spotted, extract him, crash a ship simulating our deaths, then just stroll back here? That’s the most outrageous plan I’ve ever heard.”

  “Doable, though. Get fake IDs. Don’t have to be perfect. Better if they are not, for the crash. Make it more obvious. Bad ship, fake IDs, crash, neat little story. Can’t involve third parties. Us three go. Quick in-and-out. We can change our faces; not for forever. Cheek implants. Haircuts. Hair dyes. Contacts. Like old spies. I can fly to the tube. Not a great pilot, but good enough for that. Raul can sort the DNA. We wait till your legs are good, then we leave. Just need to decide on when. And get a ship.”

  “Regarding that… I might have a plan.” Gwen has that grin of hers again, a grin we haven’t seen in months. A grin that means that she’s thought of something not-quite-bad-bad to do, and she’s itching to start hatching some kind of scrape. A grin that means that we have a solution, because she’s good at being bad, but that solution is bound to be risky. But fun with it. If you find bowel-clenching terror fun, that is.

  She steeples her hands and looks at the ceiling. “Have you guys ever thought of a new career as, say, pig rustlers?”

  I stare at her, convinced she’s lost her mind. Then Aiden goes “huh!” in appreciation, and Asher starts laughing, then guffawing, then whooping uncontrollably until he’s rolling in his seat.

  I’m left there, blinking. “I have no idea what’s going on. Care to explain?”

  “It’s simple, really. Beautifully simple. Aiden’s uncle keeps pigs. Those crunchy strips you love to shove in your face at breakfast are made of pig, by the way. Martha told me. Now, pigs are both yummy and rare. They’re worth a bomb here, and even more on a tube. You get pig from pig; get a pig daddy and a pig mama, treat them well, and away you go. A person could do damn well for themselves on the black market, for a long time if they manage things well. Problem is, pig is highly restricted. Something about their diseases and our diseases, on top of the usual air and water and waste issues. And pig poop is awful.” She wrinkles her nose. “But if someone could get two live piggies up to the tube, to the right people… That’d be worth some credit. Ridiculous amounts of credit.”

  I’m starting to get pissed off. “That was a fascinating lecture on the confluence of farm work and black market microeconomics, I’m sure, but how does it help us?”

  Gwen beams triumphantly. “Uncle Charlie has pigs. Numerous pigs. And one of the girl pigs has just had some baby piggies. Now, assuming that he’d be willing to give us a couple,” she looks at Aiden, who nods, “all we’d need is to find somebody here to find somebody on the tube who wants them. And can pay. And will pay; lots of people would try to screw us over. We need to find us some good, honest criminals. And,” she rubs her hands, “that’s what I do. I can actually contribute to the cause my unique skills and expertise.”

  Asher shakes his head. “Mayhem and shenanigans.”

  She nods. “Precisely. And the beauty of this is that the people we’ll be dealing with will have a vested interest in us not getting looked at too hard coming or going. That should help a lot. Tubers have a funny notion of their right to control their airspace. Very stuffy.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “I know, right? But we’d have a cargo we can’t be caught with without someone on the tube getting spaced for it. A cargo worth a lot to people both down here and up the tube. People who know how the system works and how to bypass it. That’s a lot of help.” She beams again. “Admit it. I’m a genius.”

  “I’m pretty sure the good folk at customs would call you something else entirely, but I have to admit that when it comes to bad ideas, you come up with the best ones.” Gwen purrs. “Now stop being so damn smug. We need to get a time line. Talk to Uncle Charlie. Talk to Raul. And you two will need to cut your hair.”

  “Eh?” “What?”

  Aiden smirks as Asher explains. “Easiest way to disguise you. Everyone knows you’d rather cut off a finger than your manes.” He grins. “Plus I always fancied getting myself a couple of blondes.”

  September

  It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.

  It’s worse.

  Gwen looks about twelve in a straight blonde bob, with blue contact lenses. She doesn’t loo
k anything like herself, which is the idea, but she still looks cute. Add some make-up, which she never wears, and they deem no other alterations necessary. Her own mother would probably fail to recognize her. And for a woman who claims to hate what they did to her, she seems to be preening an awful lot.

  Aiden looks completely nondescript. His black hair and baby blue eyes are his distinguishing features. With grey-green contacts, close-cropped blonde hair, and cheek implants plumping up his gaunt face, he looks unremarkable. He still looks alright, though.

  I look like the Chancellor. I swear I do. There was no easy way of making my skin lighter, so they darkened it. They didn’t just cut my hair off: they shaved it. And my beard, too. Then they got me to wear some cheek implants and some gods-awful affairs up my nostrils to broaden my nose. Thankfully I don’t have to wear those all the time, because they’re damn uncomfortable.

  Radically different clothes complete our disguises. Gwen is dressed in a tunic so short all kinds of bits of her are showing. Aiden is dressed like every other tradesman, as bland as bland can be. And they decked me up like some kind of muscle guy, all in black with a shirt that doesn’t cover anywhere near enough of me. Gwen reckons that it makes me look hard. I reckon I look ridiculous.

  For now, I don’t have to get out in this new ‘do. My eyesight has returned back to normal and the lump on my head is going down nicely, but I’m still nowhere near 100% and Raul wants me to keep resting. More importantly, Gwen has deemed me not only unnecessary to the current project, but actively anti-useful.

  “Loveling, we’ve made you unrecognizable, but we cannot make you inconspicuous. We don’t need any extra bodies, and we really don’t need to draw anyone’s attention. While we’re trying to get us a contact, we need to be low-key. You stick out.”

  “What about taking Asher, then?”

  “He sticks out just as much, with those frames on his legs. Look, we’re only going to talk to a few people. It’s hardly a caper.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” says Asher. “But milady’s right. If we went along, we’d only make things worse. We’d increase the danger and lower the chances of success. She’s actually being sensible. It’s just hard to recognize it because it’s such a rare event.”

  “I shall ignore that last dig,” she scoffs. “Anyway, we will be ok. We’ve thought this through. We’re going to stay in the town, talk to a few people, get a contact, come back when we’re sorted. Simple.”

  “Why can’t you come back at night?”

  “We may have to talk to people at night. You’d only worry more if you expected us and we didn’t turn up. And we don’t want to bring any trouble back here, if there’s any.”

  “See? You’re already talking about trouble.”

  Gwen turns to Asher. “Love, you’ll need to talk sense into her. We’ve gotta go.” She practically skips out the door, with a bemused Aiden in tow.

  Asher slaps me on the back. “You know she loves this kind of thing, don’t you? You’re going to have to get used to it. It’s incurable and inevitable. It’s also wonderful, once it’s over.”

  “I don’t know how you cope with it.”

  “She gets into capers. I drink and climb and crash ships. If you wanted to end up with sensible people, you kinda messed up. But there’s a method to our madness. You have to trust her; this is her world, now. And now I have to go to work. Uncle Charlie’s got a bunch of prototypes on his sim I haven’t crashed yet.”

  “Crashed?”

  “Yeah. I managed to crash every simulation so far. It’s great. I’m his new favorite pilot.”

  “He wants you to crash his ships?”

  He shrugs. “It’s an engineering thing. It doesn’t have to make sense. And it means I’m contributing to the cause.”

  “Alright for you. I’m left with nothing to do but heal and fret.”

  I really don’t have enough to do. That’s one of my problems. The other one is that there’s something I really ought to be doing, and I’m not. I’m not doing it and I don’t want to, and that makes me feel bad; but not bad enough to do anything about it.

  I’ve still not lowered my shields. I know I should test my psi-bility, or at least check that it’s still there, but I’m too scared to. I remember the pain in my head after I got hit. I remember the headaches I’d been getting from over-focusing. The thought of combining the two terrifies me. I feel sick just thinking about it.

  Raul has mentioned it several times. I know he’s not happy about my reticence, but he won’t push me. He suggested that he could run some brain scans, but that would require equipment he doesn’t have here. He’d have to get me to a med center, which would create a security risk. As I’m not even trying to use my psi-bility at the moment, I wouldn’t even begin to consider that. I’m not going to risk everyone’s safety just because I’m too frightened to open my third eye.

  I’m sitting on my bed after a check-up with Raul, torn between enjoying the luxury of idleness and kicking myself in the ass for being such a coward and a waste of space, when Asher staggers in. He’s getting around much better on his crutches and leg supports, but his gait is hardly natural and he doesn’t walk about unnecessarily. I’m surprised to see him here. I hadn’t expected him back at the house until lunchtime.

  He sits on the bed next to me and sighs. “How long are we going to not talk about this for?”

  “This what?”

  “What you’re doing with your psi-bility. Or rather not doing.”

  “What the hell? Who told you about that?”

  “Nobody. I had a strong suspicion that something was up, and you just confirmed it. Raul is worried about you. He’s also happy about your progress. That didn’t scan. And I haven’t felt you; that thing you do. I don’t mean when you project. A lot of the time, I think I can just feel you, a little bit. Like a faint touch at the edges of my… my whatever. Maybe it’s bullshit and I’m imagining it. Maybe you’re just good at really listening to people, but I think there’s more to it than that. Anyway, I haven’t felt it, whatever that is, and Raul just walked out of here looking troubled, so I put two and two together and thought I might have got twenty-two. You just told me that I didn’t.”

  “Well, aren’t you smart.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. So are we going to talk about it or what?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  Asher raises an eyebrow. “I beg to differ. If there’s a problem with your psi-bility, then we should talk about it. Same as we’d talk about it if you had a problem with your eyes, or your ears. Same as we talked about my legs.”

  “It's just that my head isn’t right. I just don’t think I can do it. Not right now, anyway.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Nope.”

  “How long?”

  “Since we linked. Head hurt really bad then. I just shut it all down and then my head kept hurting, so I haven’t opened it back up. It’s not an issue.”

  “But your head is ok now, right? Your balance is fine and Raul said you didn’t need minding anymore.”

  “Yup.”

  “And you’re not having headaches?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you still haven’t unshielded?”

  “That’s what I said.” I'm starting to feel cross. “It’s my psi-bility. It’s nobody else’s business.”

  Asher leans back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “True. Except that you’re my friend, and I love you, and your psi-bility is a part of who you are. So if something has happened that’s affected that, I’m going to care about it same as I would about anything else affecting any part of you. Quinn, we’re family. That’s how it works. You get hurt, you’re ill, we actually give a damn. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. All that matters is that it’s your problem.”

  “Yeah, well, I got whacked on the head. Now I can’t unshield. Shit happens.”

  “I don’t buy that. If that really was th
e problem you’d have got Raul to help you out. You would have tried to get it fixed. And you’d have spoken to us about it. I think that’s an excuse. I think you’re doing this to yourself.”

  “I’m giving myself headaches now? Whacking myself on the back of the head?”

  “No. I think you’re staying shielded for completely different reasons. And I think it’s partly my fault.”

  I scoff. “How could this possibly have anything to do with you?”

  “You just said it. The last time you used it was with me. I was there, remember? I suspect that’s at the root of all this. And if that’s the case, that’s bullshit. I don’t know what you think you did to me, how you tell yourself that story.”

  I cut in. “I don’t want to talk about it.” My voice sounds stronger than I feel.

  “Well, that’s too bad, because I want to and I have a right to.”

  That shuts me up. He definitely has that right.

  “I want to tell you my side of that story. And if you disagree with it, too bad. It will continue being my side of that story.” He takes a long, slow breath and lets it out. “I owe you big time. If you didn’t save my life, you definitely changed it. For the better. Probably both. The issue is, I guess, whether you can bear that. Can you bear the fact that in order to save my life you had to change it?”

  “What in the hell are you on about? I got into your brain. Without your permission. You were unconscious, for gods’ sake. It’s against everything I stand for. I don’t even have words for how fucked up that was.”

  “Bullshit.” He cuts me up. “Not even your own bullshit, that. It’s bullshit you’ve been taught in lieu of thinking, and you’ve been too chickenshit to look at it. You just sucked it right up with the rest of the claptrap the Fed told you about yourself.”

  “Are you seriously going to tell me that you think it’s ok to project like that? That it’s ok for me to walk in and out of your head? Do you even know what I could do? I could make you believe you’re happy, or desperate. I could put worms in your head that would consume you. I could make you think you love me.”