Si Vis Pacem (Heinlein's Finches) Read online

  I do what I can. I select the courses he has the best chances of passing based on his prior knowledge. I help him along with the other required classes, the ones he has no aptitude for but he needs to take in order to graduate out of gen pop. We spend two or three hours per night every night, which is cutting into my sleep something chronic. It’s pissing other people off, too: I simply don’t have the time to do this, keep up with my classes, and tutor all the people who want my help. I’m managing to make it work, though. I am exhausted and I can barely remember what Dee looks like, but I’m managing not to fuck up my life and push Warner along at the same time.

  The day he finishes the last course he needs, I feel as if I’ve suddenly come up for air. Although I kept telling him that of course he could, of course he would, I wasn’t at all confident. He barely scraped through, but he’s done it, and with three weeks to spare. His thanks threaten to turn into tears and I don’t want to see that, so I send him off to his dorm. I leave a message with the guy guarding the corridor that if Kris wants me to continue tutoring Warner, he can call me over.

  Nothing happens for two nights. I try to use the time to catch up with my sleep, but fail: waiting to find out what is going to happen is eating at me. After three days of not hearing a damn thing, I assume that my work is over. I just have to hope that Kris will honor his debt. If he doesn’t, I couldn’t let it slide: that would give everyone else the idea that they can do the same, and that would make my life very difficult. I could really do without the aggro.

  The summons comes the third night. I don’t know what it will bring: more tutoring for Warner, a settling of the debt, or some untold grief. If I’m honest, I’m nervous simply at the prospect of talking to Kris again. As I walk over to G4 I have to work damn hard not to let my uncertainty show.

  When I get there I head into the ‘fresher but the guy guarding the hallway whistles quietly at me. When I turn to look at him, he points down the hallway.

  “103.”

  “What?”

  “Room 103.” And he just turns around to keep an eye on the main door.

  Room 103 is a bedroom. All numbered rooms are. I guess I’m not tutoring Warner, then.

  For the umpteenth time, I thank the gods for Dee’s psi-bility. If this whole thing goes south I can shout for her. She might not be able to do much, but she can do something. It wouldn’t happen fast enough to save me from anything much, but at least they’d find my body while it’s still recognizable. I’d like to think that anyone who does me in is going to pay for it.

  I don’t knock on the door. I don’t see the point: whoever is in there knows I’m coming, and I don’t want to attract any extra attention. The door opens smoothly, without any sound, and reveals a two-people room like any other. Kris is sitting on the bottom bunk. Nobody else is in there.

  He looks up at me and smiles. The smile doesn’t stray from his mouth, leaving the rest of his face customarily blank and mildly threatening, but it’s still a new development.

  “Warner graduated basic ed.”

  “I’m aware of it.”

  “Your work is no longer required.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m assuming you’ve kept a tally of the hours you spent on him.”

  “Yes. I’m assuming you did the same.”

  “Yes. Provided that the numbers match, just let me know what you want. I’ll do my best to get it.”

  “What if the numbers don’t match?”

  His smile widens slightly, revealing the tips of his teeth. “Then we would have a problem, but I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “Thank you for trusting in my work ethic.”

  “I trust in your unwillingness to make waves. It defines your life here.”

  “One does what one can.”

  “Indeed.” His smile disappears and his eyes become fully reptilian. “You know what’s funny? Everyone thinks you’re some kind of genius, but you’re not. You’re almost painfully unexceptional.”

  I can’t believe this arrogant prick. “Thank you?”

  He shrugs. “If you want to get pissy about that, that’s your right, but it’s true. You got to where you are by working your ass off all the time. Anyone could do the same, but they don’t. That’s what makes you exceptional.”

  “You just told me I was unexceptional.”

  “You’re no genius, that’s for sure. But being a genius is something you just are, like being tall. If you’re proud of that, you’re kind of an asshole. Working hard, that’s something you do, and you have to keep doing it. That’s on you. That’s something you can be proud of.” He keeps staring at me. I wonder if he knows how much he’s creeping me out, and I wonder whether he cares either way.

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  “I hope looking after my brother hasn’t interfered with the rest of your activities.”

  “You know how it is.”

  “I don’t. I’m not half as busy as you. I don’t know anyone who is. How can you work so hard?”

  “I need to, so I do it.”

  “All part of a plan?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Could you be any cagier?”

  “Yes.”

  He grins – more teeth, and still no mirth or warmth. “Alright then. Let me know if I should be honored or insulted.”

  “I will. If you’re done with me, I could do with getting back.”

  “You must be tired.”

  “Must I?”

  He closes his eyes for an instant. When he opens them again, they are as expressionless as mirrors. When he speaks, his voice is perfectly flat.

  “There’s a rumor going round that you and my brother are fucking.”

  My throat tightens. I can’t let him know that he’s getting to me, so I shrug. “I’ve heard it. It was inevitable. We’ve been spending two or three hours every damn night locked in a ‘fresher together.”

  “I hope this isn’t causing you any problems.”

  I have to stop myself shrugging again. I don’t want to act twitchy in front of him. “The people who know me know that it’s bogus. I don’t much care about the opinion of people who don’t know me.”

  A tiny vertical line appears between his eyebrows and ruffles the few stray hairs there. “I meant in practical terms. If this causes anyone to bother you I’d like you to let me know. I would do my best to sort it out.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  All of a sudden his eyes lose their glaze and become dark and deep. His smile spreads all over his face, and it’s the most beautiful and saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

  “But of course you wouldn’t tell me, because you would see me getting involved as a sign of your weakness, or the establishment of a debt. This is all so much bullshit. We’re all stuck in limbo together, and the best we can do is turn it into a hell. We deserve what we get. What?”

  I realize I’ve been staring at him with my mouth hanging open. I shut it and force myself to not look away.

  “Limbo? I didn’t expect you to quote ancient mythology.”

  The line in his forehead gets deeper and his eyes glaze over again. I can see myself reflected in them, as if they were rejecting all of me.

  “I read. Obviously not as much as an intellectual like you, but I read.”

  I want to say that I’m sorry, but it feels way too close to the truth to let it out. I just keep looking at him, scrambling for the right thing to say, when he finally looks away. When he speaks again it’s without any expression or inflection.

  “Anyway, what I wanted to say was that if the rumor were true, I wouldn’t like that.”

  “I didn’t waste any of the time I spent with your brother. I worked him as hard as he could. His results show that.”

  “That’s not it. It’s just that if one of us was to fuck you, I’d rather it were me.”

  “Say what?”

  He tilts his head so he’s staring at a spot on the floor.

 
“I’ve seen you around. Everything you do, you do all the way. I don’t know anyone like you.”

  I look at him not looking at me and my brain seizes up. After about a million years, I remember what I want to say. It’s not complicated. It’s still a struggle to get it out.

  “Yes.”

  He looks up at me, his eyes as blank as I’ve ever seen them. “What?”

  “Yes.” I nearly choke on it.

  “You mean that?”

  I nod. I have to, because I can’t talk. I ran out of air. I manage to make myself walk the three steps to his bed, turn around, and sit on it. I still think it’s probably just a horrible joke, that he must be setting me up so he can laugh at me for believing, even for a moment, that he’d want to get near me. I don’t stop thinking that even when he slides over to me and runs a hand through my hair. He twists his fingers and grabs the base of my head.

  “You’re shaking.”

  “It’s cold.”

  His mouth twitches. “Come closer, then.”

  I figure that if I stay cool through this, if I make sure that he knows that I don’t care either way, then I will be able to pull through no matter what happens, whether he picks me up or drops me. He can’t hurt me if there’s nothing there for him to hurt. That’s easier to say than to do, because he’s so close I can feel the heat coming off him and his hand is doing strange things to my skin. My face is inches away from his chest, my eyes almost level with the neck of his shirt. I can see the top of a tattoo poking out of there. One of my fingers finds it and runs down along it, as far as it can go before the shirt gets too tight.

  “You want to see it?”

  I shrug and his shirt is off him so quickly that I barely see it go. Having so much of him so close to me is messing up my brain, so I try to focus on the tattoo. That’s why he took his shirt off, after all. The quality of the drawing isn’t fantastic, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. I can tell that it’s a knife, but it’s not like any knife I’ve ever seen. It’s much broader at the base, with a long, wavy blade and a curved handle. I follow the curve of the blade with my finger all the way to its tip and up again, then I rest my hand on his chest. It’s soft and hard at the same time. It doesn’t even feel real.

  When he speaks his voice is croaky. “That’s a kris knife, or keris. That’s why I got it. Well, that, and because we were all getting tattoos.”

  “What does it mean?”

  He chuckles. “It’s solid with mystical shit. Old Terran stuff. Heroism and power and that kind of crap. Sex stuff, too. A kris drinks from a person's spirit when it cuts someone. They’re like living blades, kinda. So, yeah, lots of stuff. But mostly it means that I’m a knife guy and that the guy who inked me couldn’t do complicated shapes anyway. And people call me Kris, so it kind of works.”

  “They call you Kris? What’s your name, then?”

  “Not Kris. You’re overdressed.”

  He starts peeling off my clothes. They don’t come off half as quickly as his, but he doesn’t seem to mind that at all. The more naked we get, the more comfortable I feel. Well, maybe not comfortable: resigned. It looks like this is really going to happen, and I know the steps to this dance.

  I’ve done this before. I know how it works. They climb inside you and rub themselves in you, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, their rubbing rubs you right, and it’s all good fun. Most of the time it’s nothing. It’s like you’re not even there, like you’re defined by where you’re not, by the hole you make in the world. Any other hole would do: you just happen to be today’s hole, for which you should feel lucky but also bad, because this somehow devalues you, this makes you less of a person. This is something they are taking from you even when you’re giving it to them.

  That only matters afterwards, though. It doesn’t matter during. Hardly anything does, and definitely you don’t. A couple of times I got the feeling that I could have dropped dead in the middle of it and they wouldn’t have cared, or if they did it’d be only because my death would be a damn inconvenience. A couple of times I stopped just to see what they’d do, and they didn’t even notice. They just carried on. I felt sore after, but mostly I felt hollow. I guess that’s the idea: we’re hollow shapes for them to fill, and their filling us just outlines how empty the rest of us is, how irrelevant to them and to the cosmos.

  I could never quite work out if the times when something happened for me made up for the times when it didn’t. I guess it must have, because I didn’t give up on the whole thing. It never felt right, though. It felt blasphemous, as if something vitally important, awesome in the true meaning of the word, was mangled into something small and dirty.

  This is nothing like that. From the moment our skins touch he looks at me like he cares about what he sees, like he cares about my reactions to what he’s doing. He’ll do something and pull back slightly to see what that does to me. If he got the reaction he wants he’ll do it again. It’s as if he enjoys it when I enjoy it. I find myself watching him watching me as we move, and I’ve never felt better, I’ve never felt more, and he sees that, too. We’re getting off on getting each other off, and the moment I realize that is the moment I stop being able to think.

  When it’s over we find ourselves at opposite ends of the bed, like fighters retreating to their corners. I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know what to make of this. I didn’t know something like this could happen. He’s still looking at me, but not openly like he did while we were doing it. His eyes are half-closed now, but I can still feel where his gaze touches me. He is so close and so still that I could count the freckles on his eyelids if I could look at him, but I can’t. I want to slide backwards into the wall and disappear. I want to throw myself at him again. I stay caught in the middle and do nothing.

  When his hand grabs mine and pulls it towards him, my body follows. Maybe it’s his body now: it seems to listen only to him. When he slides inside me I hear a strangled cry and I don’t know whose throat it came from. That’s when I really lose it.

  We stop three times into it – his count, not mine. I’ve lost count. I’m exhausted, but we’re wrapped around and into each other and I don’t want to move. I don’t want this to end. It has to, though, because it’s so late that it’s early. The lights have started to come on, soon there’ll be people out and about, and I can’t be found here. I have to put my clothes back on, a task I barely managed because they’re scattered everywhere and I’m hurried and flustered. I have to get back to my room. He’s lying naked on his bed when I walk out, his eyes half closed, his mouth half open, looking stunning and forlorn, like a monument to congenital solitude. He doesn’t say goodbye. Neither do I.

  I walk down the corridors towards my lair in a hurry and a daze. It’s not a safe time to be out and about so I should be paying attention, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything anymore. The only thing that matters about my life is that this happened. It most likely will never happen again, but it happened. Were I to drop dead right now, this would still be the best day of my life.

  I spend the rest of the day in a daze. I go to my classes and I do my work, but each and every moment I’m aware of where he is and where he’s not. I know his schedule well enough that I can work out where exactly he is in relation to me. I have spent enough time watching him that I can imagine how he would sit, how he would take notes, how he would get up at the end of each period, how he would walk down the hallway with his usual crowd, how in rare moments he would let the mask slip off his face for a smile or a laugh.

  I can do that with my eyes open, while performing my duties. I can deal with that. If I close my eyes, though, I can remember where his body and mine intersected, how his eyes changed as my breathing sped up or stopped. I remember his eyes burning into my skin. I remember them closing when he shuddered inside me. I remember all of it.

  I see him at lunch, in passing. He’s got his blank eyes on, but they waver slightly when he sees me. I think they do, anyway: I’m too busy looking away
to be sure.

  That night I lie in my bed thinking that there’s a good chance I may never sleep again. When the summons comes, I hardly believe it. It feels unreal. Everything feels unreal.

  Dee’s voice reaches me when I’m nearly at the door.

  “Honey, are you sure?”

  I am. I’ve never been more sure of anything.

  The world becomes neatly divided into two parts: Kris, and not-Kris. I have to deal with the latter, but I can only care about the former. Everything that isn’t Kris is an inconvenience, a waste of time and effort, a hurdle I have to jump over on my way back to him. Not Dee, obviously. She’s my friend and I want to give her my time and attention. I’d rather give it to Kris, but I know that it’s wrong, that it’s unfair. Everything else, though, is a fucking drag. I do what I need to do because I need to do it, but I don’t give a fuck. All my fucks are going elsewhere, literally and figuratively. I like it like this. I like that I’m finally able to see the petty shit of the world for what it is. It makes it incredibly frustrating, but also a lot easier to deal with. None of it feels real – not as real as he does, anyway.

  2.

  Everyone around here knows everything about everybody, and the thing between me and Kris is no exception. All the same, there is still a protocol to respect. We’re not officially out together, which is just as well as I’m not a member of his gang. I don’t know whether he’s not asking me because he doesn’t think it’d be a good idea, because he worries that I’d say no, or because he’s been told not to. I don’t really care: I like it like this. I wish we could see each other more – no, I wish that our lives were completely different, that we could just be two people studying, working, and dating like normal people do, out in the real world. I know that those are pointless wishes, though. They could never rise to the level of hopes because they are just too unlikely. It is what it is, and if I choose not to accept that all I’ll achieve is my own unhappiness.