Si Vis Pacem (Heinlein's Finches) Read online

  He leans forward and hisses in my face. “It doesn’t have to make sense! That’s how it is! That’s why you should have told me!”

  “But I didn’t think you cared. I didn’t know you wanted to be a colonist. You never told me that.”

  “What else did you think I was going to do? I have to get on with my life! I need to get my brother out of here before he gets fucked up! You know he can’t cope.”

  “I thought…” I didn’t. I didn’t think at all. I knew that I could stay here until I’m nineteen, I knew that I would need all the qualifications I could get to get a decent job once I get out, and I didn’t think about any other options. I definitely didn’t think about being a colonist. I know that plenty of people do that, obviously, but I could never quite understand why. It’s a high risk, low reward lifestyle. Every terraforming exercise is an experiment on human test subjects: when new colonies get established, there is no guarantee that they will survive. Plenty have failed or been abandoned, and the colonists don’t always get removed before it’s too late. I had no idea that Kris was considering it. I thought he’d stay here until he turned nineteen, when I’d be just a few months shy of eighteen, and somehow something would happen to make things work out for us.

  His voice snaps me out of my revelry. “Well, thank you very much for wasting my fucking time.”

  “What?”

  He runs his hands through his hair and clasps them behind his head. “This is how things get fucked up. My dad had a share. He married someone with no share. He thought he could work his way out of that, that he could make up for it somehow. He was wrong. It wouldn’t have been that bad had he kept his dick in his pants, or only had me, but no, he went ahead and had Warner. Of all the kids he could have had, he had Warner. And he never made up that share, and now both Warner and me are fucked. I’m not making his mistake. It’s bad enough being halfies. There isn’t even a name for people with a quarter share. They might as well be third-classers.”

  “And that’d be bad?”

  “Of course that’d be bad!”

  “Dee is a third-classer.”

  His arms snap forward and for a split second I think he’s going to grab me or hit me. He doesn’t, though he looks like he’d like to.

  “What the fuck does she have to do with anything?”

  Whatever I say is going to rile him up worse, I just know it. I stay perfectly still and say nothing, hoping that it’ll calm him down. It takes him a while, but he does.

  He leans back on his bed and looks at the ceiling. “Well, this is it.”

  I know what he’s saying, but I can’t parse it. I’m waiting for him to say something else, to tell me that we’ll find a way, to grab me and fuck me and make me forget it all, but he doesn’t. He just lies there, staring upwards with that blank expression, as if he’d forgotten that I’m here.

  I suddenly feel naked; not naked as we’ve been so often, naked together, but bare in front of him. I think back at the way we were together, the things we did, the way I felt, how exposed I let myself be, and for the first time ever it all feels dirty.

  I find my clothes on the floor, get dressed, and head toward the door. All the way there I’m waiting for him to call me back, to say that he didn’t mean it, or that he meant it but just in the heat of the moment. I’m waiting for him to fix it, because I can’t. Every step I take seems to take forever. When I reach the door and step outside, time snaps back into place. It’s over. It’s all over.

  Dee is an absolute angel. I wish I could thank her. I mean, I do, I thank her all the time, but I don’t feel thankful. I don’t feel anything much. She makes sure that I get out of bed, that I go to my classes, that I eat, that I wash. She tries to make sure that I sleep, but that’s beyond her powers. I lie in bed and I try to be quiet, so she won’t hear me and worry about me, but I know she knows that I can’t sleep. When I do, the nightmares are more tiring than staying awake.

  It took Kris less than a week to get a new girl. She’s not someone I can hate, which makes it harder. If he’d gotten with one of those mean, pretty girls who rule the roost here I could have despised them both. Instead he fetched up with a perfectly nice girl: pretty enough, bright, good at her classes, relatively well-connected, and with a half share, of course. She’s better than me in pretty much every way. I get better grades, but that doesn’t matter: in every way that really counts, she’s better. I can’t blame him for going with her. I can’t blame him for dumping me. I should have told him way before we started, and then we wouldn’t have started. It’s my fault he had to break up with me. If I’m hurting now, that’s my fault too: I should have known that there was no future for someone like him and someone like me.

  Dee told me off so many times for being angry. Now that I’m not, she doesn’t seem to like it. I don’t like it either, really. I don’t know what else to be, what else to feel. Most of the time, I just feel numb. It’s easier if I don’t eat or sleep – give me three days without sleep and I have no idea what’s going on. When I do that, though, Dee gets worked up about it, so I can’t take that way out. Instead I do what I have to do, carry on with my life by putting one foot in front of the other, so at least one of us may not feel like shit. Falling apart is one thing; dragging Dee along with me is another thing altogether, and not something I’m willing to do.

  Kris’ birthday comes suddenly and hurts me enough to shock me: I didn’t think I could feel that much. I don’t know what I feel anymore, really: I feel as if this term lasted a million years, but here is the day, jumping at me out of nowhere, and I am totally unprepared for it.

  They don’t make a big fuss about the wedding. It doesn’t change anything in their daily lives, really: they have to keep bunking up separately because there are no coed sections here. They’ve been fucking on the sly all the way through, obviously: nobody’s gonna marry someone they’ve not test-ridden, half-share or no half-share. All they need to do to make it official is get an appointment with the Station Captain and get their marriage authorized. Kris’ friends make a ruckus in the refectory when the two of them come back together and they all end up getting told off, but that’s about it.

  I’ve read up on how the system works, because that’s what I do, and they couldn’t apply as a household until after the wedding. That means that they could be here for days, weeks, or months. The only certainty is that Kris is going to get thrown out on his nineteenth birthday, or sooner if he flunks his classes. He won’t, though. He doesn’t fail at anything he works at.

  Nothing happens until the end of term. I don’t know if it’s because Kris couldn’t get anywhere or because he decided to wait for them all to collect their last load of qualifications, but it’s probably the latter. The last time I see them is in the refectory, the evening of the last day of term. Warner tries to say goodbye to me, I think, but he fudges it and I’m too dazed to help him through it. Under normal circumstances Dee would have stepped in and smoothed things over. Instead, she blanks him out. Watching him scurry away from our table tugs at the web of pain inside me.

  And that’s that. I know they’ve gone because they’re not there in the morning. There is no other logical explanation. I can’t let it go, though, so instead of doing my fucking work, I waste time looking up the colony postings. It takes me a while to find them, but I do. I look up their new colony too – more wasted time, but I can’t stop myself – and it sounds nice. I find it hard to conceptualize it because I’ve never actually stood on dirt, and the available data makes it sound a riskier enterprise than I’d consider, but when you’re going colonist your returns depend on how much you’re willing to risk. Kris is braver than me, that’s all.

  None of this is stuff I should concern myself with. It’s all in the past now. It’s not even that: it’s part of a fake, alternative past that would have never taken place had I not fucked up. I should focus on my life, my problems, my work, but I can’t. My brain is just not there. My body is exhausted. My grades show it: I still pass, bu
t that’s all I manage to do. That earns me a talking-to from the Station Captain, because of course I’m fucking up because I’m not trying hard enough. It’s my fault, something I’m doing at them, a way in which I’m letting them down, not something that is happening at me. I should feel privileged that she knows that I exist; instead I feel like I just got whacked on a bruise. It’s a nice reminder that the universe and the people in it do not give a fuck about me other than as a cog in the machine, an instrument performing a function. They put the air, food, and water in, and I churn out good grades. That’s my job. Nothing else about me matters.

  It matters to Dee, though – I matter to her. I try not to be a burden to her, not to worry her, but she knows things aren’t right and she can see that I’m failing to right them. I’m doing all I can; it’s just not enough.

  3.

  The news reaches us in the refectory, bang in the middle of dinner. At first I don’t understand what’s happening. Aside from the fact that I’m fucking exhausted, I have gotten so used to blanking out nasty words and petty deeds that when one of the pretty girls strides up to our table I assume it’s going to be more of the same and barely pay any attention to her. I only realize that serious shit is hitting the fan from Dee’s horrified reaction. When I tune into what the girl is saying, I still can’t understand it. She is repeating the same words, and they’re simple enough words, but they make no sense.

  “Kris is dead. Are you happy now?”

  “Say what?”

  “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Ever since he dumped your slag ass.” She points at Dee. “She knew something awful was going to happen, she saw it with her power. You didn’t warn him. Now he’s dead. They all are.”

  “What? Dead?”

  “Dead! They never even made it to the colony. I bet you love that, you sick bitch.”

  She keeps going on at me, her voice rising until it’s a screech that reverberates in my ears like an alarm bell, but I can’t hear a damn thing she is saying because I can’t fit any of it in my head. Kris is dead. My Kris. He’s dead. Kris is dead.

  I’m still rolling those three words around in my brain when the girl grabs me by the shoulders and starts shaking me.

  “They’re dead and it’s your fault. Your fault! Gwen was my cousin, and you let her die just because she was better than you!”

  I get up and my mouth starts working. Words come out of it, I don’t know where from, a long litany that states quite clearly what I think about her, her friends, and her opinion of me. When I start to explain what I think about her dead cousin she snaps out of her freeze with a growl and grabs my hair. She’s way bigger than me, but that doesn’t even register as a factor: I throw a punch straight at her midriff, as hard as I can. I hit her hard enough that she lets go of me, folds in half, and keels over. She’s still on the ground, making a strange sheep-like sound, when a hand grabs my neck and hurts me so much that I end up on the ground, too. I got lucky, I guess: if the Supervisor hadn’t been that quick to take me down I would have had a go at him. That would have landed me in the worst possible kind of trouble.

  Hitting someone in self-defense barely qualifies as trouble at all: I get a night and a day in solitary. It’s not until I come out, totally brain-fucked from spending 24 hours repeating to myself that Kris is dead, Kris is dead, Kris is dead, that I learn that Dee was there, too.

  When I see her in front of my cell I think I’m delusional, because I don’t understand why she would be here. I don’t fully believe I’m awake and coherent until she manages to grab my arm and starts ‘pathing me. I know how her brain feels. It’s her alright.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  We get escorted back to our room together. The entire corridor peers out of their doors to watch our two-people parade, which I expected, but there’s something off about it. Too many of them seem too gleeful, and I’m positive that it’s not joy at the prospect of having us back.

  The Supervisor walks us right to our room, watches us walk in, and shuts the door behind us. She has no right to do so as it’s not curfew yet, but I don’t feel any inclination to go wandering about, anyway. I don’t feel any inclination to do anything. Neither does Dee, apparently, because since she walked into the room she has not moved a muscle. She is just standing next to me, staring at the floor. I still can’t think properly, so I decide to do what she’s doing and it’s only then that I notice Dee’s drawings. They’ve been torn into pieces and scattered everywhere. There’s a piece right by my foot. I recognize it: it’s one of my favorite ones, one of the dark houses with bright windows. I go to pick it up, even though I know it won’t help, but Dee grabs my arm and stops me.

  “Don’t touch them.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re covered in something. Look.”

  She points at one of them, at the brown smear smudging the picture. I look around at the rest of them. They all look dirty.

  “Shit.”

  “Yes. That’s what it is, I reckon. Honey, don’t touch anything. I want you to stay right where you are, OK?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “So what? It’s my room too.”

  “I just…”

  “Dee, whatever happened it’s my fault.”

  “No. It isn’t. You didn’t do any of this.”

  “Maybe I didn’t do it, but I made it happen. You know what this is about. Retribution.”

  “No. This is about what you’ve always been saying: the system is fucked, and everyone who participates in it is warped by it.”

  “Fine words to describe the fact that they tore up your drawings and smeared them in shit.”

  “Nah. Other way round, I reckon. They wiped their asses on them, then tore them up. It shows dedication, at least. I wouldn’t get shit on my hands just to piss somebody off.”

  “You don’t have shit in your brain.”

  “Thank you.” She takes a deep breath. “OK. I’m going in.”

  She walks towards the bed and I follow. When she grabs an edge of her blanket and pulls it off, I can smell what they’ve done before I see the stain.

  “There you go, honey. They pissed my bed. That’s original.”

  “Were you expecting something creative?”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything at all.”

  “When is laundry day?”

  “Firstday.”

  “What day is it?”

  She purses her lips. “Fourthday. You should know that. I’ll stuff the bedding inside my pillowcase. It can stay in the corner until next week. I can sleep in my uniform.”

  “It’s going to smell like hell. And if the Supervisors find it, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “We can wash it. Wash it a bit, anyway. If we put it at the bottom of the shower while we’re washing, the worst of it will get rinsed off.”

  “Honey, if we do that we’ll get spotted.”

  “So what?”

  “So they’ll know they’ve got us touching their piss. They’re going to love that.”

  “Dee, they pissed on your bed and shat on your drawings. I don’t think there’s any coming back from this.”

  She covers her face with her hands and rubs her eyes. When her hands come down her expression is so forbidding that I can barely recognize her.

  “Honey, this is different, isn’t it? This is war?”

  “Yeah. I think so. And this time we’re not going to win.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this time they’re really out to get us. We could never beat them; not really. We just made it not worth the hassle
.”

  “And now?”

  “And now they don’t seem to care about that anymore. I don’t know. I can’t do this anymore.”

  She grabs my hand and squeezes it hard. “Of course you can. You’re the biggest badass this place has ever seen.”

  “Dee, I’m fucking tiny.”

  “That’s not how badassery is measured. Come on: let’s get this mess sorted out. You’ll feel better afterwards.”

  She drags her bedding off her bed. Her blanket can hopefully soak up most of the piss, so she drops everything into it, folds it up, and shoves it in the corner nearest the air outtake vent. Some of the piss still drips on the floor. I use the fragments of her drawings to clean up the drips and throw them in the recycler. When I turn around she’s staring at her mattress. Right in the middle of it is a large wet patch.

  I look up at Dee, and her eyes are way too shiny. She’s the strongest, toughest person I know, but this is a bit too much.

  I grab the mattress and lift it up. “Look: this side is dry. It’s not come through. If we turn it over it will all drip back through the wet side.”

  “It’ll still be a pissy mattress.”

  “A bit. OK, this is what we’re going to do: we rest it at an angle, so the dry side stays dry, and I’ll go grab soap and water from the ‘freshers so we can rinse it off.”

  “It’ll still be wet tonight.”

  “Probably. But you can take a night on the floor. You’re a tough girl. Let me take a look at mine: if it’s not as bad as yours, we can swap them over.”

  “And you’ll sleep where?”

  “With you.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “No, it isn’t. Let me see first, OK? But let your mattress drip.”

  I climb up the stairs to my bunk.

  I expected the bed to be wet. I didn’t expect the turd in the middle of it, but it’s not that surprising. What I really did not expect is that someone would take a chunk of said turd and write endearments in giant, wonky letters on my wall. The permutations on “whore” don’t bother me any. The solitary “murderer” does, even though it’s misspelled.