Heinlein's Finches

by Robin Banks

  “Couldn’t be better. Routine check, and Ivan has concocted something he wants you to try. Selfish pigs, the lot of you, flaunting your drinks in front of me.”

  Asher scoffs. “Risking blindness in the cause of getting on with our neighbors is hardly a privilege.”

  “Yes, I could see the struggle last time. I really felt for you. The singing in particular really brought home your suffering. And did a lot to spread it around, too.”

  I huff. “Will you two shut up for a moment? I’ve been away. You could at least pretend you missed me.”

  “I did miss you. I had nobody to massage my poor feet.”

  Asher looks incensed. “What of me, woman?”

  “You suck at it.”

  “Only if you’re lucky.”

  I sigh. “I should have taken the long way home.”

  Mattie pops her head out of her door. “Uncle Ivan is coming?”

  “Yes, poppet. Tonight.”

  “I want to show him how I stabbed daddy.”

  Asher winces. “Can you please tell him, rather than show him? I need some time to recover.”

  Mattie giggles. “Maybe. Mommy, can I go and tell Uncle Aiden about his mail?”

  “Sure, but you go straight there and straight back. Deal?”

  “Deal.” She gives me another kiss and she flounces out of the door.

  I turn to Asher. “You’ve got a tracker on her?”

  “Always.” He takes a receiver out of his pocket. “But I give it six months before she figures it out and learns to disable it. I prefer line of sight, anyway. Sit on the porch? The wife can bring us our drinks.”

  “I’d rather drink mine than wear it, if it’s the same with you.”

  “A very wise choice.” Gwen leans over, somewhat laboriously, and gives me a kiss. I take a good look at her.

  “I missed you. You look tired.”

  “I am tired. I swear, this is the last one.”

  “You said that the last time.”

  “I meant it the last time, too. But you guys kept making sad eyes at me. Hard to make a ‘no’ stick when you do that.”

  “I’m eternally sorry.”

  We all sit down on the porch, Gwen between us, watching Mattie head off. Aiden’s house is not that far and there’s nothing remotely dangerous between our places, but I didn’t have that level of freedom when I was her age. I like it here.

  Asher looks at me over Gwen’s head. “How did it go?”

  “Smoothly. Almost boring. Took way too long, though. I thought I was going to miss the spawning.” Gwen elbows me in the ribs. “I have a couple of jobs for you, maybe. Way above my paygrade. I value my life too much. Totally up your street.”

  “If they can wait until the spawning, and a bit after. I’m not missing that, either.”

  “What are we like for credit?”

  “Bloody awful, but we’ll manage.”

  It doesn’t take long for Mattie to be heading back, Aiden in tow. I’m surprised they’re on their own.

  “How’s Sasha?”

  Gwen beams. “Twice as pregnant as me. Literally.”

  “Twins?”

  “Yup. Alyosha won’t shut up about it. Aiden is alternatively ecstatic and terrified, as is proper.”

  “I bet!”

  “We were thinking about moving them in here for a bit. We can make room, and they’re going to be exhausted.”

  “That’d be cool. We can all be exhausted together.”

  When they get to the house, Aiden’s looking flustered. “Mattie says you’ve got something for me?”

  “Yeah. Still in the hold. Heavy as hell. Relays work, apparently, but it took a while to get through.”

  I get up and walk with him to the ATR. “I heard about Sasha. Congratulations.”

  He looks at me with a mixture of fear and delight. “Yes! It’s great. I think. They’ve started to kick. It’s great. I’m scared shitless.”

  I pat him on the back. “Yeah. That’s how it goes. Here’s your stuff. Want to open it here?”

  “Maybe best. Mattie wants to watch, but, you know. Safety.”

  “I ran the basic checks. I can nearly guarantee it’s free of known explosives.”

  “Reassuring.”

  We put the crate inside our containment box and watch as the bots break the seals. “No bio, no chem, no radiation. So far, so good.” Inside the first crate are an envelope and another crate. “Envelope is clear. Wanna check that out?”

  “Yup.”

  I open the box, extract the envelope, and seal the box again.

  “Hey, it’s from Uncle Charlie.”

  “I thought it might be.”

  “Told him about Sasha as soon as we knew. Figured the message may take a while to get through. Will have to tell him it’s twins. Would love to see Martha’s face.”

  “If you want to read in peace I can check the next crate.”

  “Ok. Ta.”

  I watch the bots do their thing. “Clear. You want me to get it out?” No answer. “Aiden?” He’s staring at a ream of papers, blinking. “Everything ok?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Uncle Charlie gave us a present. A big one.” He grabs one of the box handles. “Little help?”

  I help him carry the crate over to the porch.

  “So. Papers are for us. Crate is for Mattie. From your Great-Uncle Charlie. But you will need to share. Kinda. I hope it’s ok.” He looks at us.

  Gwen shrugs. “Hard to say without knowing what it is, but I can’t think Uncle Charlie would do something inappropriate.”

  “Well, it’s a bit… You’ll see.”

  Mattie pops open the lid and frowns. “What is this?”

  “It’s a cryo-crate. If you press the green button, it will start the wake-up process.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see. Guys, check this out.”

  Aiden hands us over some papers.

  Asher frowns. “Death certificates? Who’s dead?”

  “We are. Again. Check the records.”

  “It’s all gobbledygook. What are we checking for?”

  “Biometrics. DNA. They’ve been changed. These are copies of the official Fed records. We can’t be tracked anymore. Our new records are all squared up. We’re legit. Uncle Charlie’s present for us.”

  Gwen whistles. “Wow. How the hell did he pull that off?”

  “Brilliance runs in the family.” Aiden grins.

  “So this means…”

  “Oh, bloody hell.” Asher looks dazed. “If he’s really done it, which I don’t doubt for a moment, we could just fly to any tube, go right through security. We could go straight. Use med centers, send the squirt to school, get proper jobs.”

  “Yup.”

  We exchange looks. “We’re not gonna do that, though, are we?”

  “Oh hell no.” “Whatever for?” “Pfft.”

  Aiden looks wistful. “We could go visit Uncle Charlie, though. When all the kids are big enough to travel.”

  Gwen beams. “Yeah, that’d be good. Mattie would like Martha.”

  “Martha would like Mattie. I want to go tell Sasha. This is big news.”

  “You don’t want to see what’s in the crate?”

  “I know. In the letter. I’ll come back tomorrow.” He gets half a kiss from a distracted Mattie and slaps me on the back. “It’s kinda for you too. Uncle Charlie says hi.”

  We stand around in a daze for a bit, Mattie still staring at the crate, until Asher pops into the house and comes back with a bottle and two glasses.

  “I guess this calls for a celebration. You can watch us enjoy this moment, little lady. You wanna sit down? You look fit to drop.”

  “Well, this has been a bit of a shock. A good one, but still a shock.”

  “Sit yourself down before I have to make you.”

  “Pfft.”

  We all resume our seats and watch our primary set. I spot two figures walking over from the village – Ivan and Elena, I guess. T
he place is completely still; the only noise I can hear is the faint bubbling of the fish pond pump. Mattie’s shriek of joy startles me.

  “Look!”

  Slowly making its way out of the crate, still wobbly and recovering from the cryo, is a little fluffy brown blob. Little brown nose, green-yellow eyes, and two overlarge floppy ears.

  “Nonny, look! Great-Uncle Charlie sent me a puppy!” Mattie turns to me. “Like in the stories you tell me!”

  Glossary

  ‘Arc knife’. Arc blades can cut through anything without going blunt. Unsurprisingly, they make people somewhat nervous, and are banned in most places.

  ‘ATR’. All-Terrain Rovers. Six-wheeled vehicles designed for passenger and cargo transport both in- and out-bubble. The out-bubble versions are independent habitats.

  ‘Bubble’. An artificial dome designed to allow human habitation of planets where the local environmental conditions (atmosphere, temperatures, radiation, etc.) would otherwise be deadly.

  ‘Chick’. A first-year Academy cadet.

  ‘Groundling’. A person who has never been to space.

  ‘Grub’, ‘grubber’. Someone who moils about in the dirt, i.e. someone who lives on a colony on a planet rather than an artificial environment. Alternatives: ‘dirtsider,’ ‘colonist.’

  ‘Out-worlder’. On a colony, someone who was born anywhere else.

  ‘Tuber’, ‘tube people’. Someone who lives on an artificial habitat in space. Cylindrical space stations are called ‘tube’ because of their shape, but the label of ‘tuber’ is also applied to people who live on a torus.

  First, second, and third class. The class system harks back to the time when humanity first took to space. In a nutshell, the first class owned the ships. The second class bought their tickets. The third class worked their way on board.

  Discography

  Apropos of nothing, here’s a list of the music I listened to while writing this.

  10 String Symphony – 10 String Symphony

  10 String Symphony – Weight of the World

  Altan –The Widening Gyre

  At The Drive-In – Relationship of Command

  Bob Dylan – Gaslight Tapes

  Brian Tyler – Children of Dune

  Cloud Cult – Live

  Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Architecture & Morality

  Rachel Baiman – Speakeasy Man

  Rammstein – Mutter

  Rammstein – Raise, Raise

  Rick Springfield – Tao

  Talisk – Abyss

  The Civil Wars – Disarm

  The Mission – Carved In Sand

  The Mission – God’s Own Medicine

  The Mission – Children

  The National – Boxer

  The National – Cherry Tree

  The National – High Violet

  This Will Destroy You – Young Mountain

  This Will Destroy You – Live in Reykjavik, Iceland, Disc 2

  Uncle Tupelo – No Depression

  The songs Asher sings are:

  The Chieftains – Red is the Rose

  Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley’s version)

  About the author

  Robin Banks finds writing in the third person intensely creepifying, so I won’t.

  I was born a while ago, and these days I don’t regret it too often. A fan of peregrinations with a terrible tendency to get myself marooned, I currently dwell with an excessive number of dogs right at the end of the big cabbage field. That’s the big field with the cabbages, not the field with the big cabbages. Don’t be silly.

  I enjoy road trips, dogs, guitars, and getting into scrapes. My favorite writers are Tom Robbins, Spider Robinson, and Matthew Stover, Rory Miller for non-fiction. I refuse to be landlocked, because you need to have some standards. I like Irish coffee with condensed milk in lieu of cream. You can’t help some people.

  There is a rumor going around that I might in fact be a collection of raccoons hiding inside a hoodie, but that’s not been confirmed to date, possibly because I bite.

  Ok, so this is what happened.

  I went for a camping holiday with my dogs. I took some 1970s feminist sci-fi with me (Suzette Haden Elgin – I highly recommend her). Then I found some Conan Dark Horse comics in a second-hand shop, and started reading those, too. The two things somehow meshed in my head; they have a rather different take on gender issues, so they provided an interesting contrast. I was walking around with the dogs most of the time, which always helps me think. I started to wonder about how things are, and how things could be, and what that could do to different people. I thought about people I don’t know but I’d like to meet, and the more I thought about them the more I liked them and wanted to meet them. So I had to write a damn book to know what happened to them.

  I hope this didn’t suck for you.

  If you enjoyed this, please check out:

  https://www.amazon.com/Robin-Banks/e/B01MU5VWGL

  https://www.facebook.com/HeinleinsFinches

  https://godsbastard.wordpress.com/heinleins-finches/

  With many thanks to Mary, Shane, Kami, Inna, Maya, Dan, and Peri for all their help. Turns out that it’s damn helpful to know people who’re much smarter than me, and very patient and kind.

  Among The Stars,

  the second book in the Heinlein’s Finches series,

  will be available on Amazon as a kindle book and in paperback.

  Here’s the first chapter as a sampler.

  Celaeno

  Year 2377

  Terran Standard

  1.

  Smart people will tell you that there are no happy endings because nothing is really truly over. I know I’m not smart, but I’ve been around and I reckon that’s about half true and half bullshit. Happy endings, yeah, sure, they don’t happen: happiness is something you’ve got to keep fighting for. Endings, though, they’re real alright. Sometimes things end on you and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. That part of your life is over, there’s no going back, and pretending otherwise is just kidding yourself.

  When the door of the juvie center clangs shut behind me, I know that’s what an ending sounds like. There’s no going back. Not ever. I’ve spent the best years of my life in that place. It was home, in a way, and now it isn’t, and that’s that. Although I’m glad to be out, I’m not enjoying that feeling of finality. That’s a word Tom taught me. I never thought I’d use it, but here I am. All I can do is move forward, 'cause I sure as hell can’t go backwards.

  I look out in the distance to see if the portabubble is still there. That’s a ridiculous thing to do and I know it: I know it’s there and I know that I can’t see it from here. Still I try, and I fail, and that just ties another knot in my stomach. I can see Tom waiting for me, though, and that makes me feel better. I wasn’t at all sure he’d be here. We’re lucky that our birthdays are so close together, but he’s had to be out a few weeks already and there was no way for me to know if he was ok. I half expected him to have gone off somewhere without me. Or to be in jail, or dead, or tied up in a basement – those are always options. But he’s here, sitting on his bag right in the middle of the damn road, ignoring the scowls of the passers-by. That’s my brother.

  He shakes his head at me. “If you could see your face. I mean, I know I’m pretty, but seriously. This isn’t the time.”

  I shrug. “Whatever. I thought you might have gone on ahead.”

  “Not bloody likely. This was your idea. You can pull it off.”

  “Sure I can.” I’m not sure at all and Tom knows it. I’m starting to get really worked up now.

  He gets up and we start hoofing it straight to the gate. I’m supposed to be heading home, but nobody’s going to make me and nobody really expects me to, either. I don’t care, anyway. This is way too important. It’s the only chance we’ve got.

  “Luke, my man, if you can’t pull it off, then it’s back to plan B.”

  “We don’t have a plan B.
”

  “Speak for yourself. I can find me someone old and rich to keep me and spend the next two years in luxury.”

  “As a bumboy?”

  “Bumboy, toyboy, not fussed. Life of luxury, I tell you.”

  I know he’s talking shit. He’s as scared as I am. There’s just as much at stake for him as there is for me. More, probably: my home may be shitty, but I’m pretty sure it won’t kill me. I know he’s pretending to be cool about this, but I don’t care. It still makes me feel better. That’s one of the things I love about him, that he always makes me feel better. So I shoulder him hard enough to make him stumble and nearly faceplant on the cobbles.

  “Asshole.”

  “Whatever.”

  We stand up a bit straighter, make ourselves a bit bigger, and march down the road like we’re some kind of big deal. Which we are, really. I mean, either of us on our own, we don’t amount to much, but the two of us together, we can look after ourselves. The citizens who’re giving us dirty looks ought to know that. I mean, I look like shit and Tom looks worse, with crumpled clothes and shaggy hair and fading bruises all along his jaw, but we can cause a bit of trouble. People ought to watch out.

  When we get to the bubble gate, we’re reduced back to being mere mortals. We have to line up and take our turn with the rest of the throng. I’ve never seen the place this busy. I mean, I hardly ever come here, a handful of times per year at most, but the crowd seems impressive.

  The gate guard gives us the disgusted look that all guards always give us. I sense Tom starting to brace up for something, so I elbow him. “Not today. Save it.” He scowls at me, but he cuts it out. He knows I’m right. We get through without any excitement and get crammed in the tunnel with the crowd. We’re crawling forward way too slowly given the hurry we’re in, but there’s no way to get through any faster without trampling people.

  When the tunnel finally opens up into the portabubble, I realize that hurrying wouldn’t have served us, anyway. The place is so busy that nobody would have had time for us.

  There’s a row of All-Terrain Rovers and mobile habitats making a square perimeter, with only one entrance into the structure in the center. Everyone is being funneled into that, but that’s not where we want to go. Not that we could get in if we did. I pull Tom aside and we find a quiet spot out of people’s way where we can wait this out. It’s hard not to stick out hanging around like this, but there’s not much we can do about it.