Heinlein's Finches Read online

  Today is no exception. The exercise seems simple: go from A to C without crashing into B. Some of the chicks – most probably those with no prior experience or training – take to it immediately. Asher can take most groundlings and teach them to float, provided nobody else has mucked about with them before. His ability to do that is the only reason Asher was ever singled out from the mass of injured Patrolmen dropped onto the Academy after the Troubles of ’68.

  When Asher arrived here, his prospects did not look good. There was no chance of him returning to active duty. The medics’ hope was that, despite his dented body and crooked mind, he could be somehow repurposed. His time in the Tank was only meant to be part of his rehab. But when they let him loose in there, instead of flapping about like most people do, he floated; artlessly, gracefully, and efficiently. Then he started to teach other recovering Patrolmen to float, with a better success rate than the official instructors. That was a game changer, for him and for the Academy.

  Before the Academy incorporated floating into its program, Patrolmen had to learn it mostly on the job. That still has to happen, to a certain extent. Floating in the artificial environment of the Tank is nothing like floating in the vast emptiness of space. However, it’s the best the Academy can do on-planet to prepare cadets for zero g work. The more they learn here, the less of a chance there is of them making a mistake in space. Space is not a forgiving environment. Mistakes are costly, though rare; people generally only get the chance to make one. Asher’s teaching can save lives. That’s the only reason the Academy and the Patrol are putting up with him, really.

  The Patrol doesn’t fully understand how Asher does what he does, which doesn’t suit them at all. They like curricula to be definite, structured, and replicable, and the Academy duly complies. Asher doesn’t; never has, and never will. He flatly refuses to set a curriculum, claiming that it would inevitably lead to holding some students back and leaving others behind. Neither the Patrol nor the Academy approve of his methodology, but they can’t argue with his results. What Asher is doing, unorthodox as it is, works better than anything anyone has tried up until now. The numbers of groundlings successfully completing their training is higher than ever hoped for, and accident rates are at an all-time low. That’s why, after a few weeks of poking and prodding at him in a lab, the Patrol finally gave up understanding how he does what he does and just let him get on with it. He’s been at it five years now, and he just keeps getting better.

  I’ve had a quick scan at Asher’s file from the lab; it was laying around his office, I was feeling nosey, and he thought it’d be funny to let me read it. The terminology they used to describe the results of their tests sounds terrifying to me: stuff like 'adaptive aberration' and 'neuro-divergent a-verbal plasticity'. None of it comes close to explaining how it all came to be. Knowing what I know about Fed scientists, I don’t believe for a moment that they left it at that. His aptitude is way too valuable. I’m willing to bet that somewhere in a Fed lab sit a bunch of Asher clones, being experimented upon to find whether he was born or made.

  Or whittled, perhaps. Although I still believe he’s one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen, he doesn’t look anything like a man is expected to these days. Hell, he doesn’t look anything like a healthy person is expected to. To look at his naked body is to see the working of muscles and tendons on joints laid bare. His forearms are so fleshless you can clearly see the hollow between the bones. His hands are skeletal under their scars. Even in his floating suit he looks way too sparse. Emaciated. And I know he’s looking good, now. He’s doing better. I’ve seen holos of his first days at the Academy, when his cheeks were so sunken that you could see the outline of his teeth. But those were the days before he found the Tank, or the Tank found him; the days before Gwen. These days there’s something to keep the fire burning within him from consuming him.

  His energy seems boundless as he puts us through our paces. I’m still struggling with finding my vector. I’m managing to complete the exercise, but with constant readjustments, without flow or finesse, until he grabs me. He puts three fingers against my abdomen and pushes, simulating a contraction. “Remember?” he smirks. And I do remember. I made that contraction against his body last night, and heard him moan in response. And when I try it on the course it is the movement that changes my going-there to going-here, and nothing could be easier or more natural. Across the vast Tank Asher waves at me, and I know that I’ve made him genuinely happy. Not proud – happy.

  Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

  When the bell rings, as we’re filing out, he clasps me by the arms and beams at me, equal to equal. And although this isn’t your typical professional behavior, I see no trace of the man who only last night spent what felt like an age – a torturous, glorious, endless, all-too-brief age – with his face buried between my legs. I used to find it weird at the start, the contrast between Asher-the-lover and Asher-the-professional. Then I realized it was just all of Asher, all of the time, and my trying to categorize him was a sign of the smallness of my mind, not of any inconsistency on his behalf.

  But the session is over, and I must rein in my wondering thoughts, again. I’m perishingly bad at concentrating at the best of times, and although this is tolerated – even expected, given my specialty – I think it’s important that I try to do better.

  I am trying to shake it all out of my head as I rush to work. The start of the academic year always means unknown risks and requires extra vigilance on my part. This is how I earn my keep – by paying attention, not by spacing out, though the way in which I pay attention looks a hell of a lot like spacing out.

  I take my place at the back of Gwen’s lecture hall. Gwen is already at her place at the front, looking even tinier than normal in the huge auditorium. I sink into my chair, into my job, and into my gift.

  My title of ‘Adjunct’ doesn’t mean anything much beyond placing me on a decidedly low rung in the Academy’s hierarchy. My official duty is to provide clerical support to Gwen. My unofficial duty is to evaluate the emotional state of her students, and flag them for support if necessary. My extremely unofficial duty, which is also the real reason I’m here, is to identify people who present a danger to her. And the reason I got picked for it is that my brain is wired weird.

  My gift, such as it is, works best either if I make eye contact with and focus on an individual, or if I unfocus my eyes and spread my awareness wide over a crowd. Without the interference of my vision, it’s easier for me to see the ebbs and flow of emotions. Crowds tend to be relatively uniform, like a mood-soup. If an emotional state flares up suddenly, like a Roman candle in my mind-vision, normally it either spreads or fizzles out. Sudden changes and extreme moods are what I’m on the look-out for.

  I can’t read people’s minds. People are so horrified at the thought of someone being able to see what they’re thinking, even though we’ve put so much effort into developing ways to break out of our individual brain cages. Talking, writing, music, the arts, head wiring, memory implants, they are all designed to help us truly connect with one another. But put your average individual in front of someone with anything vaguely resembling psi-bilities, and they freak out. Maybe this says more than we want to know about humans as a species.

  Anyway, I can’t read thoughts. I read moods, which is something everyone can do. Gwen can do so nearly as reliably as me using only body language, for gods’ sake. And I may be able to project a little, to engineer a mood-state, but again, who doesn’t? Emotions are contagious. We spread them and catch them all the time. Ok, I can do it with my eyes shut, and from a distance, and through walls, but it isn’t anything that any human doesn’t do anyway. It’s not special. It shouldn’t be scary. But it is. As people here are not supposed to know about my psi-bility, that’s not an issue, but I have to be on my toes not to do anything too weird, not to raise any suspicion.

  The chicks have settled now but are still twittering among themselves, so Gwen clears her throat. She alwa
ys takes the first theoretical lecture of the year. For many cadets, it’s a lecture that crushes some core beliefs in the world that they live in, in humanity and its history, and in their future at the Academy. Some quit as a result. Some don’t quit, and we have to force them out. Many will need psycho-cultural support for days or weeks. I’m here to identify those who pose the greatest threat to Gwen and to themselves.

  “The cultural history of humanity in space is also the history of our loss of Terra.” Gwen’s voice always sounds bigger than her diminutive frame should be able to support. She gradually dims the auditorium lights, as a massive image of Old Terra appears on the screen behind her.

  “In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Terran Age, humanity had become so used to scraping through environmental disasters that it believed itself invulnerable. The Silent Springs, the nuclear threats, the damages to the ozone layer, the little Dustbowls of the twentieth century and the massive ones of the twenty-first, all were overcome by the simple means of throwing new and better technology at old problems. After so many near-misses, twenty-second century Terrans were sure that there was no mistake they could make that their Terra could not adapt to, or that they couldn’t fix. They were wrong.” The picture of a blue-white, serene sphere changes to the picture we’re all so familiar with. The tension in the room grows. It’s only natural; not many people feel neutral about the near-destruction of their home world.

  “By the twenty-third century, humans had to take up in-bubble living on the very planet that shaped not only their anatomy and physiology, but also their cultures. They had altered their own environment to the point that the cradle of their lives could no longer support them. And still they hadn’t learnt their lesson.

  “When they finally conquered space… The first colonists really thought in those terms. They thought of themselves as conquerors pouring forth to take their rightful place among the stars. They managed to ignore the fact that they were little more than environmental refugees, running away from the destruction they had themselves caused.”

  The room is heating up now, hotspots of shame and anger bubbling up. Nothing unexpected.

  “What those pioneers found in space was worse. The new planets they discovered, even those labeled as suitable to terraforming, were all subtly wrong for us. Or rather, we were wrong for them. Terra had molded us to fit her, and our requirements were too specific. Not only we lacked the ability to make those new worlds suit us, but we realized that we didn’t even know what that would have required. That our knowledge of what supported us on Terra was so incomplete as to be useless. We were left orphans of our birth world, unable to return, and rejected by the new worlds we were finding. Most of the colonies had to resign themselves to living in-bubble permanently. Living as alien ticks on the worlds they thought they were conquering.”

  I feel something now: a flash of hatred, suddenly erupting and just as suddenly dying down. Dying down too quickly: people don’t normally feel that much that briefly.

  “Scores of colonies died off. Scores of colonists died even on the most successful colonies. The story of human colonization of the cosmos is a story of death; of catastrophes and lost hopes. The physical results were awful. The psychological results were worse.” Gwen’s voice grows softer, and sadder. “It seems that part of what makes us human is an inability to comprehend our own cosmic irrelevance.

  “We had to find a reason for our failures and our miseries. So we took them personally. We took the new worlds’ inability to provide us with what we required as a deliberate act – a stubborn refusal on their part. We sought solace in the old gods, or made new ones. We railed against the heavens. And the more extreme the divergence between what we needed and what we could get, the more extreme our collective psychosis grew. The more precarious our situation, the more extreme our beliefs and customs became.”

  The images now show ancient Terran people in their traditional attires, carrying out their traditional activities: from semi-naked tattooed hunters to office workers to miners to soldiers and so on.

  “As we have always unconsciously done, while we were trying to force our environment to adapt to our needs, we were adapting our cultures to our environment. Those colonies that didn’t adapt perished. Those that survived sometimes did so at great expense.”

  The images become more shocking now. Stylites. Public flagellation. A woman-corral, the women inside naked, filthy, and bearing the marks of protracted abuse. A child sacrifice. Ritual mutilations.

  “These are the worlds we set out to patrol, worlds that are nominally part of our great Federation. Yet many of these worlds have been so long ignored by the Fed, so long left to their own devices, that they no longer bear any resemblance to Old Terran culture. World whose customs and beliefs are so different from ours that they seem inexplicable and inexcusable. World that have codified extreme habits born of extreme needs to the point that they have forgotten what those habits were originally for.

  “And our duties are conflicting. We do not have the right – no, we do not give ourselves the right to wipe out diverging cultures just because we find them repugnant.”

  That flare up of hatred, again. Stronger this time.

  “We also do not give ourselves the right to idly stand by while innocent citizens suffer or die. We still hold a responsibility towards them; a responsibility to offer them choices, not the right to tell them how to live. We are not aiming to replace the beliefs that currently control them with a blind faith in the trappings of our culture. We are aiming to show them other options. A lot of the time, really, we’re aiming purely at damage control.

  “Many people believe that volunteering to be Patrolmen is volunteering to bring the light of civilization to benighted heathens and carve order out of chaos.”

  Another flare of hatred. Hotter, darker, stronger.

  “This is not the case. We cannot aim to make things right, because our concept of ‘right’ is our own, idiosyncratic creation. We can only aim to make things… better.” I open my eyes fully to see her hands flutter, trying to catch the right words to encapsulate concepts that are as difficult to articulate as they are to grasp. She sighs. “My role at the Academy is to teach you to analyze behavior you consider aberrant and to establish what beliefs underpin it; to collect information on the environmental and social pressures the colony in question was subjected to at the time of the belief’s establishment; to draw the connection between the two; and to judge whether either the belief or the behavior could be mitigated or replaced without negatively impacting the chances of survival of the colony as a whole.

  “Another way of putting it is that I will teach you to draw half-assed on-the-spot conclusions based on partial information and take actions that could cause you to wipe out an entire world. Or not take action, and allow great sufferings to continue unchecked. And as your reward, you’ll get a snazzy uniform, the long-term loan of a fancy spaceship, and less credit than a miner would draw, but less risk, too. Unless you screw up. In which case you’ll probably die a horrible death.”

  I’m pretty sure this part of the lecture is not included in the official syllabus.

  Gwen slowly raises the lights back up to reveal a blinking, confused, deflated sea of chicks, with the odd one sporting a determined or stoic expression. Those are likely to be the good ones, or the really bad ones.

  I zone in on the source of the flares of hate. He’s a tall, muscled guy with a close crop of red hair. His body language is neutral-aggressive, closed in. He’s clearly part of a group, but it seems to be one of those transient aggregations people create instinctively in a new and somewhat threatening place, rather than a long-term arrangement.

  I get off my seat and head off to the refectory before the stampede commences. Gwen will be making her way there through the service corridor, which is as safe as anywhere can be.

  The refectory is already buzzing with people, although the horde of chicks hasn’t descended yet. I grab a tray without really looking
at it – it’s never much to look at, anyway, though designed with our optimal health in mind – and hoof it to the Third Years’ Table, which is already half-full with familiar faces. Some of the guys only got back last night from their breaks, and we haven’t had a chance to catch up yet. I’ve missed them.

  The Third Years’ Table is one of those unofficial institutions that learning centers seem to grow like fungi. It is rather awkwardly positioned in a corner, as far away as possible from the serving hatches. This puts it conveniently away from the main flow of people and well away from where the Proctors sit in all their glory. It’s a quiet table, suitable for the intellectual pursuits of our most advanced students, junior Professors, and sundry Adjuncts like me. It gives us the opportunity to carry out lofty discussions without being disturbed by the rabble. Or it would, except that being a third year cadet at the Academy is to be less of a model of academic achievement, and more of an odd duck.

  Some people refer to the Academy as a paramilitary institution. Those people are wrong: there is nothing ‘para’ about our militarism. We are not part of the army. Officially there is no standing army to be a part of – an army against whom? – though every able person could be called upon to serve if the need ever arose. Regardless of all these theories, in practice we are the closest thing the Fed has to an army.

  Patrolmen are not soldiers, but cadets are trained much as soldier used to be on Old Terra. The Academy is designed to churn out as many Probationary Patrolmen as possible as quickly as possible. This urgency is the reflection of a real need: it’s a big universe we live in, and currently we’re only managing to patrol a small proportion of it. There are colonies out there that haven’t seen an out-worlder in decades. Also, Patrolmen die. Space travel is not accident-free, and every interaction, even with a known world, carries some risk. Unknown worlds carry unknown risks. We send our kids in flying blind. Some don’t come back.