Si Vis Pacem (Heinlein's Finches) Read online

  I have never felt more awkward, but I also feel as if I’d put down a weight I didn’t know I was carrying. This may yet work. If they don’t split us up, if they let us work together… But there are too many ifs here. We don’t know what to expect, and there is no getting around that. We know we’re safe, because our society abhors all violence, no matter what. However, we simply have no idea as to what shape our safety might take. That scares the crap out of me, if I have to be honest.

  I don’t have long to indulge my worries. The murmuring in the room rises to a panicky babble and then the place goes so quiet that you can hear people breathing. I turn around and spot a woman walking right through the middle of the crowd towards a podium on the far side of the room, facing the door. One look at her face, and I know who or at least what she is. Aside from the fact that she’s older than most people I know – she could be over forty – she wears that expression of cloying concern typical of all top Community speakers. I’ve seen that expression on so many faces throughout my life that just looking at it makes my skin crawl. Whatever is coming will suck, but it will be for our own good. For our own good we will eat what they give us, study what they tell us, go where they send us, do whatever they want us to do, always.

  Nothing good ever comes from that attitude; I learned that in my crib. People like her believe so completely in their own rightness that they can’t even contemplate the merest possibility of conflicting views having any validity. If someone’s opinion clashes with theirs, their default position is that everyone else is obviously wrong, and they are obviously right. If anyone disagrees with them, that proves that that person is either uneducated or incapable of education. Anyone in possession of the facts would agree with them. To ignore that person’s expressed wishes is therefore the only responsible and caring course of action. In time, everyone will hopefully come to see the light and thank them. If someone doesn’t, that’s too bad, but the only way to help some people is to save them from themselves.

  The very nature of that attitude makes it completely self-supporting. You cannot fight against it. You cannot even argue: any remonstration, however valid it may seem to you, only reaffirms how wrong you are. In fact, the more you remonstrate, the more confused you must be and the less valid your opinion is. It’s like trying to swim in a slurry pit: the more you thrash about, the faster you drown.

  Watching the woman climb up the podium makes my insides tighten. I could kick myself for that. The Community regulates our lives when we behave ourselves. They’re hardly likely to take a back seat when we’ve shown ourselves to be aberrant. My surprise is proof of how subpar my thinking has been. I should have seen this coming.

  What comes up behind her, though, is a surprise: Outsiders. There are two Outsiders in the room, wearing Outsiders’ suits and carrying some kind of Outsider implement – what are they, weapons? Could they be carrying actual weapons?

  The three of us huddle together instinctively. It makes me feel better, even though I know it’s probably a futile gesture. The guys look as blank as I feel. I have no idea what this apparition means. Many of us get to see Outsiders in the distance at some point in our lives, but they are just alien shapes moving through our world, reminders of how lucky we are to be here. The poor things come over to try and learn how to live properly. They mostly keep to themselves, though, and we are discouraged from interacting with them because their customs are so backwards that they can’t be trusted to behave. What they could possibly be doing in this building, in this room, with that Community speaker, is completely beyond me. I don’t have a chance to try and work out what it could mean, though, because she starts to speak. Her voice is full of syrup and ice. It sends shivers down my spine.

  “Dear Citizens, on behalf of the Community of Pax, thank you for being here. Thank you for your co-operation.”

  As if we had a choice. I can’t believe those people.

  “As you all know, the cornerstone of our society is peaceful coexistence. Peaceful coexistence is the only way to ensure that all of us can lead safe, productive, fulfilling lives. We have learned the cost of violence from our ancestors, from their struggles and failures, from the wars that ravaged their countries, and from the petty criminality that made their lives uncertain, brutish, and often short.

  “Peace is both our goal and the means through which all other goals can be achieved. In peace we can all live together regardless of our differences. In peace all of our voices carry equal weight. In peace we are able to do our very best and enjoy the fruits of our achievements. Only in peace can we truly be a community, and only in peace can we truly be free as individuals.”

  Her face scrunches up into a frown. “Peace demands our constant dedication, though. As it watches over us, it requires us to watch over it. If we want to reap the rewards of a peaceful existence, we must ourselves keep the peace. Citizens, this is why we are here.”

  Her voice becomes sharper and more businesslike. “You have been invited here because you have broken the peace. Our society gave you the opportunity and means to enable you to live in peaceful coexistence, yet you chose a violent path. If we allowed you to continue walking down that path, there is no knowing where it may lead you, where it may lead all of us. Unchecked, the poison that you have embraced can spread.

  “We cannot allow you back into our society until this poison has been purged from you. You will be glad to hear, however, that you do not have to deal with this alone. We can help you.”

  She points towards two guys in white coats standing near a side door. “Our scientists have perfected a method to enable you to overcome the dark drives that have temporarily overwhelmed you. It’s a safe and painless procedure. With their assistance, you will be put under anesthesia and connected to a simulation of the events that caused you to dirty your hands with violence. The simulation will give you the opportunity to redeem yourself, to show us that you can make the right choice – the peaceful choice. As soon as you have completed the simulation successfully, your memory will be readjusted to the correct behavior, and you will wake up. It will be as if nothing had ever happened.”

  The murmuring in the room picks up again. The speaker raises her voice to drown it out.

  “Citizens! Although the novelty of this may be alarming to you, you know you can trust us. You know we wouldn’t harm you. We respect the sanctity of life above all. If you follow our scientists to the lab, we can commence the procedure immediately. The sooner we can get you through the simulation, the sooner you can return to your lives.”

  The guys in white coats wave at people to follow them out the door. The first few people inch their way out tentatively, but as soon as a few of them have gone the herd follows them as if it was the easiest thing in the world. I stay as I am, petrified. The guys haven’t moved, either. Noah’s face looks stern. Jake looks horrified.

  A quick scan of the room tells me that there are very few people not filing towards the exit. They all look as unhappy as we do. The more the room empties, the more obvious we become.

  As the last people file out, eight of us are left behind. When the people in white coats start to shut the door behind them, a guy sets off running towards them and two more follow on his heels. That leaves five of us not budging. The Community speaker doesn’t seem too happy about it.

  “Citizens, can I help you? Do you have any questions or concerns?”

  She gestures at us to approach her, so we head towards the podium. Noah starts out walking with us but picks up speed as he goes, and soon we are trailing behind him. Even from this angle, I can tell he’s furious.

  Once we all get near her the speaker puts on her concerned face. I wonder if she practices it in front of a mirror.

  “Citizens, is there a problem? Is anything unclear?”

  Noah starts talking before I have had a chance to think of an answer.

  “Let me see if I got this straight. What you are planning to do is put us in a medical coma and lock us into a nightmare – a nightmare
that we can only escape by failing to survive it. Am I right?”

  The woman looks aghast. “Citizen, that is not at all our intention! As I explained, the simulation…”

  Noah interrupts her. Looks like Jake was right about him needing someone to look after him: nobody interrupts Community speakers.

  “The simulation mimics the events we went through. So, for those of us who have been aggressors, getting it right would be easy. All they have to do is not attack. They were in control of the situation in real life and they will be equally in control in the simulation. For those of us who were the victims, however, the story is completely different. In order to get out of the simulation, we would have to allow ourselves to be killed or raped…

  The speaker squeals. “Citizen! Mind your language!”

  Noah carries on undeterred. “…Raped, or maimed, or whatever. Until we allow ourselves to be brutalized, we will continue to relive an event not of our making. We had no control over it then and we will have no control over it now. You are locking us into a nightmare.”

  He looks around at us: “Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I could not make a different choice. What I did was not a good thing, but it was the right thing. The only way I could make a different choice is if I was a different person, and I wouldn’t want to be that guy. But I had a choice, of a kind. I am sure there are plenty of us who have seen a lot worse, people whose alternatives were so bad as to be no choices at all. This girl here,” he says pointing at me, “do you have any idea what you are asking her to go through? To go through indefinitely, too – how many people end up stuck in the simulation?”

  Up until the words came out of his mouth, I didn’t realize why the prospect horrified me so much. Now I understand: I could not go through this. I could not allow myself to be violated and do nothing. I do not have it in me to be a docile victim, so I would never get out of the simulation. I don’t even want to go through it and win again, if you can call what I did ‘winning.’ I don’t. I didn’t enjoy hurting the guy; I just did what I had to do to stop him from hurting me. After the fact, I enjoyed the fact that he got hurt, in a way, but the whole thing was mostly revolting. It’s not something I want to go through ever again, and sure as hell not something I want to walk into. I can’t do this. I won’t do this.

  The Community speaker looks flustered and angry now. “I do not have the statistics at hand. I can assure you that this procedure was created with the outmost care in order to minimize dangers to individuals whilst maximizing the success rate.”

  Noah’s eyes narrow. “OK, forget about the statistics. Are there people who never come out of it? That’s all I want to know.”

  The Community speaker’s face shifts. Her concern and care for us evaporate and she looks cold, hard, and furious.

  “It is theoretically possible for subjects to remain in the simulation for extended periods, if they resist the process. It is, however, a matter of individual choice. Nobody is forcing anybody to remain in the simulation a second longer than necessary.”

  Jake erupts. “You are forcing us to get in the simulation, though, aren’t you? Because, frankly, if you’re not then I’ll pass on this. I’m with him.” He nods towards Noah. “Everything he said applies to me too.”

  I step closer to them. “Wherever they are going, I’m going too.”

  The Community speaker smiles at us. It’s the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a bunch of creepy smiles in my time. “You do understand that we cannot allow you to reintroduce yourself back into our Community? Not after your actions, and particularly not after you manifested this unreasonable unwillingness to correct your behavior and drives. There is no place for you here as you are.”

  Noah stands up even straighter and folds his arms. It makes him look about twice the size, and that’s saying something.

  “What are you going to do with us, then? Because you will not get us to go along with this.”

  Her smile gets broader, but no warmer. “If you do not go through the simulation, these officers of the Patrol will remove you from Pax. If that is your decision, there will be no coming back.”

  I finally find my voice. “Hang on. What if we refuse to go?”

  She squints at me and speaks slowly and loudly, as if she thought I struggled to parse speech. “You can’t refuse to go. You will be made to leave.”

  “What if we resist?” An idea is forming in my mind, but it can’t be right.

  “They will remove you nonetheless.”

  “By force?”

  “It can hardly be called use of force if they are simply removing you.”

  “Physically grabbing us and dragging us away isn’t using force?”

  “You appear to be determined to leave us no other choice.” Her face reassumes her mantle of concern. It makes me want to hurl.

  “So you would harm us to forcibly remove us from our homes, because we harmed others who wanted to harm us, all in the name of peace…” I trail off. I can’t fit this in my brain.

  “We wouldn’t harm you. As I stated, these officers of the Patrol…”

  “Even better. You’re authorizing Outsiders to use force against Citizens. Your hands are clean. I’m not sure about your conscience, though. This is what it was always like? All we ever needed to do was say “no” hard enough, and we’d find out that our entire system, everything you taught us was based on this hypocrisy? That we haven’t eradicated violence, just farmed it out to third parties?”

  She’s got nothing to say to that. She doesn’t really have to, though. Her expression speaks clearly enough: she looks at me as if I were sad and disgusting, like a malformed newborn or a bird with a broken wing.

  We don’t have much to say either. The news seems to have hit us all. Even Noah looks deflated. I take a step forward, purely to remind myself that I can’t take a single step back, and when I speak I try to sound as if I’m not about to shit my pants.

  “I don’t see the point in fighting those Outsiders. They are bigger than me and those things they are carrying could be weapons, so I would lose. If I can’t stay here anymore, I guess I’ll have to go.”

  Noah and Jake look at each other, then they both nod. The two other citizens still with us seem uncertain, but that doesn’t last long. As soon as one starts to walk towards the lab door the other follows her.

  “I guess it’s just us,” smirks Jake. “Where’s our ride, then? I don’t want to be late for tea.”

  I have no idea where he finds the nerve to be this impudent, but I’m grateful for it. The Community speaker looks at us in disgust, shakes her head, and strides off.

  The Outsiders stay behind. We stare at them and I assume they stare back at us, though it’s hard to tell through their helmets. One of them waves at us to come forward and they all start walking out the main door. We follow them out of the building and into a smaller transport. They wait for us to sit ourselves in the back, then close our door, climb up front, and drive off. They haven’t said a word to us yet.

  The contrast between those alien figures sitting right in front of us and the familiar landscape zooming past us is starting to get to me. I know this place like the palm of my hands – better than that, in fact. I spend zero time staring at my hands unless it’s to pop a blister or take out a splinter, but I’ve looked at our land for as long as I can remember. I’ve never been this far from my homestead before and everything looks weird from here, everything looks the wrong way round, but we are heading towards home, or what was my home.

  We zoom right past it as if it didn’t matter and for a second everything snaps into its rightful place. I know everything here: the children’s home where I grew up, the school, the neighbors’ houses where some of the kids lived, the fields, the barns – and yes, the barn where that jackass decided to push his luck, but that was just something that happened, just one of those things. I can’t understand how something I didn’t start and was so quickly over can take my entire life away with it.
/>   I know being scared is counterproductive right now, I know that I need to stay calm and think clearly so I can salvage whatever I can out of this gigantic clusterfuck, but I can’t. I can’t do a damn thing but watch my life whizz right past me until it’s so far away that I can’t focus on it anymore, though that could be because my eyes got itchy. They do that sometimes.

  I wonder if I can change my mind, if I can rewind the clock and go through that simulation. Five minutes of that, ten on the outside, and I could have everything back. I could take it. I know I could. Afterwards, though, I wouldn’t remember why I did what I did. I couldn’t tell myself that it was a strategy, a little loss to avoid a larger one. I’d just know that I let myself go through that and did nothing to stop it, that I somehow believed that it was the right thing to do. I don’t think I could take that. Way I see it, the options I have, and that’s if I still have options, are to either lose myself and keep my life, or lose my life and keep myself. It’s not even a competition. If I can’t trust myself to have my own back, then I have nothing at all.

  I can tell when we go past the guys’ homestead because their shoulders go rigid. They look around and back, same as I did, and I can see the same thoughts cross their minds. They lock eyes for a few moments, then Noah shakes his head and they both slump in their seats.

  We’ve travelled so far now that I can’t recognize anything anymore, but the landscape still looks familiar. The homesteads look like homesteads, the barns like barns, etcetera. I know how everything would look close up, even though I can’t see it clearly. It’s nearly dusk. As the light fades and scrubs away the details from the scene, the windows of the houses are turning into pinpricks of light. This has always been my favorite time of day, the time when I could look out and imagine our lives to be just as idyllic as we tried to make them.