Si Vis Pacem (Heinlein's Finches) Read online

  Si Vis Pacem

  Robin Banks

  Si Vis Pacem

  © Copyright 2017 by Robin Banks. All rights reserved.

  Written by Robin Banks.

  Cover Illustration © Copyright 2017 by Robin Banks.

  Cover design by Robin Banks.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of Robin Banks.

  While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy and legitimacy of the references, referrals, and links (collectively ‘Links’) presented in this e-book, Robin Banks is not responsible or liable for broken Links or missing or fallacious information at the Links. Any links to a specific product, process, web site, or service do not constitute or imply an endorsement by Robin Banks of same, or its producer or provider. The views and opinions contained at any Links do not necessarily express or reflect those of Robin Banks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Community of Pax, Pax, Year 2465 Terran Standard

  1.

  2.

  FED Youth Sorting Centre, Alecto, Year 2465 Terran Standard

  1.

  FED Youth Sorting Centre, Alecto, Year 2467 Terran Standard

  1.

  2.

  3.

  FED Patrol Academy, Hyperion, Year 2468 Terran Standard

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  Glossary

  Discography

  About the author

  Community of Pax, Pax, Year 2465 Terran Standard

  1.

  The prisoner transport stops in front of a squat, white building. They just park up, open the doors, and leave us to make our way in. They don’t even bother telling us where to go. I guess they don’t have to. It’s not as if we could run away, anyway. Where would we run away to? Nowhere would take us now.

  I follow the trickle of people up the steps and down a corridor towards the only open door. When I get there I am truly shocked: not only this is the largest room I’ve ever been in that wasn’t a barn, but it’s packed. I am not used to being in crowds, let alone counting them, but there could be a hundred people in here. I never dreamed that there could be that many of us. Being a deviant is far more common than I thought. I don’t know how I feel about that, but it doesn’t matter. This isn’t the time for feelings.

  I turn right and walk along the wall until I reach the mid-point between the entrance and the corner, then I lean against a pillar. I do my usual thing: I try to disappear into my surroundings, to become invisible, or at least insignificant. I bow my head slightly so my hair covers my eyes and then I start to scan the room, hopefully without being noticed. I don’t think I know anyone here, and if I do that may be a bad thing, but finding some allies may be useful. I also want to know if there is any trouble coming my way. There usually is.

  Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of people here are teenagers. There seems to be something about our teens that makes us more volatile, more likely to follow the darker side of our nature. It can’t just be the raging hormones; our sexual servicing program is specifically designed to circumvent that natural pitfall. Then again, getting plugged into machinery just isn’t enough for some of us. I know that all too well.

  Everybody is behaving in a way that is so intensely pathetic and so typically human that it makes me want to scream. Sometimes I think that there is only a handful of real people, cloned into endless replicas who are only capable of parroting the same stereotyped behaviors. Given how many of those behaviors are counterproductive, it’s a wonder our species survived.

  Most of the folk are gathered in the middle of the room. They stagger around, whispering to each other with naked worry in their eyes. I know what they are whispering: what is going to happen to us? Does anyone know anything? It’s a waste of time and energy, and they know it. The one thing we can be sure of is that none of us know what’s going to happen. That’s the whole point: we’ve done the unthinkable and now we must face the unknown. I don’t get why anyone would bother to go looking for reassurance that they know they can’t get, but that’s people for you. To make matters worse, some have already started to flock around the wanna-be-alpha types, who are, as usual, puffed-up with misplaced self-confidence. What they could possibly be confident about is beyond me. We’re all equally clueless and we’re all probably screwed. If they were half as brave as they try to look, they’d face up to that.

  Thinking about the uncertainty I’m facing, about a future I can’t begin to fathom, is making me feel agitated. My breathing is becoming shallow and irregular. If I allow panic to take over my body, my mind will fall next, and that won’t help me. I control my breathing: in-one-two-three, hold-one-two-three, out-one-two-three, hold-one-two-three. After a few cycles I feel steady again. I couldn’t achieve inner stillness if my life depended on it, but all those meditation classes haven’t been a total waste of time.

  Once I’ve gotten myself back to proper functioning, I start scanning the walls. The worst and best people here are likely to be relying on their protection. Nobody with any sense is going to face unknown dangers on all sides when they can cut their risk in half at no cost.

  The wall to my left is lined with a row of cages. I look inside them and immediately regret it. I guess the cages contain those deemed too unsafe to be loose in the company of other people without resorting to violence, and the bulk of them are depressingly young children. It turns my stomach, but it makes sense. When our ancestors determined that the only way to protect us from violence was to eradicate it, they realized that this must start in the womb. Fetal murder was made illegal regardless of the health status of the fetus and mother, but that didn’t mean that all babies made it into our Community. All children are tested continuously for their potential to integrate. Those who cannot meet our criteria because of conditions that can’t be managed by medical means, those with unreliable tempers or uncontrollable rages, are simply removed. We’re not supposed to ask where they are removed to. I have been told countless times that it’s for everyone’s good, but seeing the reality of it still shocks me. The theories fail to convey the image of tiny tots in metal cages venting their distress with nobody to comfort them.

  Only one adult is in a cage. That also makes sense: it would take a freak incident for someone who has been integrated all the way through to adulthood to be deemed that dangerous. In the end cage, though, I see a familiar face. It’s uglier than it used to be, and that floods me with a fierce joy I know I shouldn’t feel. Whatever. Why should I care? I am already paying for my sins; I might as well enjoy them.

  I continue my scan and I find what I’m looking for. Two guys are leaning against the wall, turned slightly away from each other. They look relaxed, chatting quietly and ignoring the room around them, but their positioning maximizes the angle they cover. The moment my eyes fall on them, the one facing me spots me and eyeballs me so hard he might as well have nailed me to the wall.

/>   They look a bit older than me, maybe sixteen or seventeen. They can’t be any older because they’re clean-shaven. They are dressed for work, same as the rest of us, and they both have the pale complexion, enormous grey eyes, and curly blonde hair that are the norm around here – one of a million reasons why I always feel so out of place, and why catching myself in mirrors always freaks me out a little. If I don’t look at myself for a while, I forget how odd I look.

  Their similarity starts and ends with their coloring. The guy looking at me is of average height but painfully thin. I bet he’s strong with it: although there isn’t much of him, what there is seems to be solid muscle. The guy further away is built like a carthorse: tall, broad, solid, with the easy muscles of someone who got that way doing long hours of hard graft. When he turns to face me I feel a twitching in my pants. Over a decade of lessons on how all people are the same, regardless of gender, and how we shouldn’t objectify them or project our sexuality onto them, and my body still continues to do its own thing. I feel somewhat justified, though, because this guy is fine. His eyes are the color of that blue stone, what’s the name, sapphire? Not that I’ve ever seen one, but I read about it. That’s not the point, anyway. His eyes look kind, with slight crinkles at the edges that suggest habitual smiling. He smiles broadly at me now, which makes the crinkles deepen and makes him look even finer.

  The thin guy raises a quizzical eyebrow and I feel like a fool, gawking at them from across the room. They’ve spotted me anyway, so I make my way towards them. Godsdamn it, but the big guy looks even better close up. I know I’m small for my age, but he’s seriously built. He feels so solid and looks so kind that I file him as a potential problem: I could fall for him all too easily and I don’t need this right now. My situation is complicated enough without adding to it.

  I smile at the thin guy and introduce myself. “Hi. I’m Heaven.” It’s not precisely inspired, but at least if I don’t look at the big guy too closely I can manage to sound relatively coherent.

  The thin guy grins. “Did you give your parents hell about that?”

  “I’ve never met them. I’m a gifted kid.”

  He looks upset, which is not what I wanted to achieve. It always goes like this and it never makes any sense to me. We are all raised by our community rather than by our parents; it’s the only way to ensure that we all get all we need, after all. People are fallible and inconstant. Systems are not. Most of us have very little to do with our parents as soon as we start school. Kids may go home to visit on the eighthday if they have any time to spare, but that’s about it, so I really can’t see why being relinquished at birth should be such an issue. Instead of having a family I hardly see I don’t have one at all: so what? People always treat it like a big deal, though, and they get all freaked out when they find out. It’s even worse if I don’t tell them straight up. It always seems to come up eventually and it makes them freak out even more.

  The big guy cuts in. “I’m Noah, and this is Jake. I would apologize for his manners but that would be a full-time job.” His voice is deep and rumbling. Despite the stress I’m under, it makes me feel all squiggly inside.

  “Hey, there’s no need to be like that!” complains Jake.

  Thankfully his voice does nothing for me at all, much like the rest of him, so I manage to scramble my wits back together.

  “Have you known each other long?”

  “All our lives,” rumbles Noah. “He’s my cousin. He’s OK, really, apart from his tendency to stick his foot in his mouth. We’re pig farmers, mostly. He didn’t spend enough time with folk growing up and the hogs didn’t teach him any manners.”

  “How did you both get here, though?”

  As soon as the words leave my mouth I realize that I don’t know what the protocol is. Maybe I should not be asking so soon, so directly, or at all. Maybe I’ve just made a terrible faux pas that will cost me. This seems too important an issue to ignore, though. Two people getting here together is odd, and even if it wasn’t I’d still need to know what brought them here. I know who else came here with me, after all.

  “I only came along to keep an eye on him,” grumbles Jake.

  “Actually, he came here because he doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut,” drawls Noah. Even when he’s exasperated he still manages to sound kind. They are looking serious now, though, and this is starting to feel like an argument they’re used to having.

  Jake turns towards me. “Big boy here saved half our homestead. I just thought it ought to have counted for something.”

  “You’re exaggerating again,” sighs Noah.

  “Exaggerating? OK. He didn’t save half the homestead, just the kids. Who cares about them, right? We can always make some more.”

  I’m none the wiser so I wait for them to elaborate, but they seem too busy staring each other out. After an uncomfortably long time, Noah rolls his eyes and Jake carries on talking.

  “Something went wrong with one of the hogs. I wasn’t there at the time so I don’t know how it started and why, but the damn thing turned on his handlers. He didn’t just get frisky: he was trying to tear them up, and he was big. They managed to get out of his way, but that only made matters worse because they let him escape in the process. Out goes the hog, and what he finds is a load of kids coming back from school for the eighthday. He managed to get two of them before Noah stepped in.”

  They must be having me on. “A hog? Attacking people? No way.”

  Jake shrugs. “I know, right? If I’d not seen the results, I wouldn’t believe it either, but those two kids got messed up. I mean, really messed up. Some of their insides ended up on their outsides. It was bad, and the rest of the kids were about to get theirs, too, so Noah did his usual thing and charged forth without a single thought. As usual, it worked. His guardian angel works overtime.”

  I turn to look at Noah. He’s an impressive specimen, but this seems a bit far-fetched. “You stopped a hog? Full grown? Bare-handed?”

  He shakes his head. “It wasn’t that big. And I wasn’t bare-handed.” I must be giving him a funny look, because he frowns and adds, “I used a kitchen knife.” All I can do is stare at him. “I had to!”

  This is getting surreal. I turn to Jake. “So he saw an animal that had tried to kill some grown-ups and was killing kids, and just threw himself at it? With a kitchen knife?”

  “Yup. That’s him all over. Act first, think later, if at all, and somehow get away with it anyway. It’s uncanny.”

  “And they send him here for that?”

  Jake erupts. “Yes! That was precisely my point. I thought the whole thing could be kept quiet, you know? Given the circumstances. But the elders determined that the bloody slaughter of an animal in front of a bunch of children…”

  Picturing that makes me feel nauseous. It must show on my face, because he quickly changes tack.

  “…anyway, that is why they sent me here. I made my point a bit too strongly, apparently.” He brightens up. “Not much of a loss, anyway. I didn’t have much worth staying on for without this guy. And someone needs to look after him.”

  Noah looks at him with a mixture of affection and exasperation. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by how readily they display their emotions. I have never been alone growing up, but I’ve never been encouraged to form the kind of bond these guys seem to have. If they’re keeping anything from each other, I can’t imagine what it may be. For a moment I drift off thinking about that, about how it might feel to have someone in your life who really knows you.

  Jake’s voice jolts me out of my daydream. “What about you?”

  I have to force myself not to fidget. I still can’t tell the story without tying myself into knots, which is puerile. It’s over and done with and I should be able to talk about it. It’s just something that happened.

  “A guy got the wrong end of the stick. He tried to have aconsensual sex with me.”

  Noah’s flushes red from the bottom up, as if it was filling up with heat. “He wh
at?”

  “You heard it. Don’t make me say it again.”

  “How old are you? Eleven?”

  “Fourteen!” I hate it when this happens, and it happens every time. Yes, I’m small. Big deal.

  “But… Why are you here? Shouldn’t he be here?”

  “He was quite forceful. I didn’t let him. He’s here too.” I point over my shoulder to the end cage.

  Noah and Jake stare at me, then at the cage I’m pointing at, then at each other, then at me. They are so in synch it would be funny, if I wasn’t so worried about their opinion. This could make us or break us.

  Jake leans away from me like I smell bad.

  “So… The guy in the first cage tried to have acon sex with you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Older guy? Nearly as big as my lummox cousin?”

  “Yup.”

  He coughs. “Did he always wear an eye patch?”

  I knew the question was bound to come up. I just knew it.

  “Nope.”

  I’m used to people’s reaction at this point. Behind whatever compassion they might muster, they are horrified. They expect me to be horrified, too, to be filled with self-loathing. The fact that I am not, that I cannot feel bad about what I’ve done, makes everything ten times worse. I have done a monstrous thing and I don’t feel bad about it. I feel bad about not feeling bad, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for them. I’m not sure it’s enough for me. I understand them being horrified by me, really. I would feel the same it I wasn’t wired so wrong inside.

  I am bracing myself for the inevitable shunning, when Noah sticks his hands under my armpits, picks me up as if I didn’t weigh anything, spins me around, smacks a kiss on my forehead, and roars, “good girl!” When he finally puts me down again, it’s all I can do to stand up. It takes me a few moments to realize that my mouth is hanging open.

  I look around to Jake. He is howling with laughter, though I’m not sure if it’s at Noah’s action or my reaction. When the whooshing sound in my ears stops, the entire room has fallen silent. Everyone is staring at us. So much for staying unnoticed. My face is roasting and I realize I’m blushing. I am actually blushing. This can’t be happening. I don’t blush.