Si Vis Pacem Page 20

  “It’s not really the done thing here, but if you want to dance Nate can take you for a spin.”

  While Nate is coughing and spluttering his disapproval, I try to work out what the hell is going on.

  “Why is it not the done thing? Those people are dancing.”

  “Dancing is fine. A boy and a girl dancing with each other may raise a few eyebrows, though. This is more of a same-sex kind of place.”

  “Oh. Weird.”

  He scowls ferociously. “My sexual orientation is not to your taste?”

  “No, not that. That you have segregated dancing, kinda thing.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, mostly it’s just because this place doesn’t let many straight people in. It’s safer that way. I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but being gay isn’t terribly popular around here. It’s a lot better in the third-class bubbles, but here if you go to one of the straight clubs and get friendly with a same-sex person, people respond badly.”

  “What? Why?”

  His scowl melts. “I don’t know. I don’t get it either.”

  “So you two guys are…”

  I guess they’re not, because Nate starts laughing so hard he falls over sideways while Rody’s eyes widen in panic.

  “No. We’re friends.”

  “I’m his mentor, technic’ly,” chortles Nate.

  “Mentor my ass. He was here before me, granted, but I’ve been looking after him since I got here. I don’t know where he’d be without me.”

  “I’d have flunked out and got myself a real job somewhere. Living a life of luxury. Earning actual credit.”

  “There’s more to life than credit,” declaims Rody.

  “Just as well, given that we don’t have any.” Nate turns to me. “So, do you fancy working here? Rody can introduce you to the manager.”

  “What? No! I couldn’t. Dee could.”

  “Why not? We worked here during Rody’s first year, before we got too busy. He sorted it out for me.”

  “Just look at the place! It’s way too fancy for me.”

  Nate tilts his head and peers at me under that little forehead furrow of his. “I think you’d do just fine.”

  Rody rolls his eyes and elbows him. “Nate, she couldn’t reach the top of the bar. Leave her alone. Hey, do you think we need to rescue Dee?”

  I look across the room and Dee is not dancing anymore: she’s leaning against a wall while the pretty lady kisses the living shit out of her.

  “Huh. No, I don’t think so. She’s pretty good at standing up for herself.”

  “Good to know. Most of the people here are great, because the owner doesn’t stand for any shit, but they can be a bit forward.”

  “She’ll be OK. It’s about time she got lucky.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth I wish I could pull them back. That’s way more information than I wanted to spill.

  “What? But she’s so stunning!”

  “Where we come from, same-sex stuff wasn’t the done thing, either.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  Rody is blinking, as if he surprised himself with the question. Nate’s brow is furrowed again. They are both looking at me and I just don’t have an answer to their question. I don’t know if I trust them yet; they’re good company, but that doesn’t mean that they’re good people. More importantly, I haven’t agreed on a script with Dee. My story is her story: I don’t have the right to spill it if she doesn’t want me to.

  I’m still waiting for divine inspiration, when Dee magically appears at my elbow. She’s smiling, but there is a hint of worry in her eyes.

  She starts raving about how much she loves this place, which makes Rody go off on a disquisition about how much more wonderful it is at when they decorate it for the holidays, which gives us a chance to ‘path.

 

 

 

 

  Dee spends the rest of the evening stuck to me. I try to encourage her to go off and do her thing, but she won’t, and she won’t tell me why. I can’t work out whether she’s so concerned about me that she doesn’t want to leave me, so overwhelmed by all that kissing that she needs a break, or actually enjoying Rody’s company so much that she’d rather chat with him than suck face with pretty ladies. She still seems to have a good time, anyway. We all do, so much so that I don’t realize how long we have been there until we step outside. As soon as the fresh air hits my face, all I want to do is curl up and go to sleep, which isn't surprising: the display on the Fed building at Landings informs me that it’s so late it’s early.

  The streets are empty, so it doesn’t take us long to get back to the Academy. We’ve just managed to convince the biometric lock to let us in when Nate pipes up. “Hang on. What time is it?”

  Rody rolls his eyes. “Not this again. It’s time we were in bed, son.”

  “We can rest when we’re dead.” He starts bouncing on his feet. “They’ve got to see this. You know they do. Come on!”

  Rody shakes his head but follows him. “Do come on. You might as well. When he gets like this it’s easier to go with than to argue. And he’s right: you’ve got to see this.”

  We enter the tiny doorway that leads into the left-hand tower, where a poorly-lit foyer leads us to a narrow staircase winding its way up into the darkness above.

  Nate is still bouncing. “Come on! We’ve got to get up there before… Before. There’s no time!”

  He rushes up the stairs without a backwards glance. Rody waves us forward with mock chivalry. I start to climb because I can’t think of what else to do, and Dee follows me.

  We go up the stairs in single file. They are so narrow and crooked that we can’t do anything else. I’m OK until about two floors up, when I run out of puff. Dee isn’t doing much better: I can hear her panting behind me. Rody is behind her, still talking to her in a perfectly normal voice, which makes me hate him just a little bit more. Nate is so far ahead I can’t see him, but I can hear him bouncing up the stairs as if gravity was a moot point. A few moments later, he bounces back down. He stops when he sees me, eyes wide in concern.

  “Are you alright?”

  “Yes,” I manage to puff. “Just not used to this.”

  He frowns a little. “g-force a bit much?”

  “Nah. I’m just not used to living in a 3-D landscape, I guess.”

  “Ah. Yeah. I forgot. Not much stair-climbing on a tube, hey?”

  He moves to the narrowest end of the step and waits for me. When I reach him, I wonder if he’s going to try and touch me, and what I will do if he does. For the life of me, I can’t find an answer to that question. Thankfully I don’t need to: he just walks up the stairs alongside me, even though the steps are so narrow at that end that his feet can barely find purchase.

  “I was on a tube last. On a torus before that.”

  “Oh! I’ve never been on one of them. What was the g-force like?”

  “Terra-normal on the torus. Pretty much like here on the tube. On our floor, anyway.”

  “And you were on the torus how long?”

  He is straying into the realm of Questions People Just Don’t Ask, but something about the way he is asking makes the question feel unintrusive.

  “Fourteen years. Just over.”

  “That’s great! Your bone structure must be fantastic!”

  I’m so taken aback by that comment that I look up at him, miss my step, and nearly land on my face. From behind me comes a loud tittering.

  “Paxy, you’re going to have to get used to this kind of thing. Our Nate missed a memo on how to talk to people. Just yesterday he complimented a lady by telling her how clean her colon was.”

  Nate turns around to smile at Rody, nearly landing on his ass in the process. “It was, though! Cleanest colon I ever saw.”

  “I’m not questioning your judgment nor your standards, my darling boy
. Merely your filters, or lack thereof. One doesn’t normally compliment people as to the cleanliness of their intestines, nor their bone density.”

  “Check your privilege, Roadster. Just because you were lucky enough to be born in high-g…”

  “Lucky? Spoken like a true bourgeois. Try working at high-g, then tell me how lucky you feel. Hell, just try doing any actual work, for a change. You’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

  Nate flicks his hair out of his eyes. “The Roadster doesn’t get it. That’s why I keep him around: to edge my bets. If that revolution of his ever comes round, I’m going to be hailed as a friend of the people.”

  “That’s a blatant lie. The truth of the matter is that you enjoy my company. And my style. Where would you be without me?”

  “At the top of the tower already.” Nate beams me a smile and charges up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time.

  When I finally reach the top, I find him in a large, open room that takes up half the width of the tower. He is leaning so far out the window that I worry about his safety, doubly so when he hears me and turns to wave at me without pulling back.

  “Come on! If you don’t hurry up you’ll miss it!”

  As I walk towards the window, the landscape opens up before me, so impossibly vast that I feel as if it’s pulling me forward. Below us stretches the town cradled in its crater, its avenues like veins spreading out of Landing, the odd little light trickling out of a window to pour warmth into the gloomy streets. Above the edge of the crater, the dark grid of the bubble frames the sky. The stars are still luminous above us, but the light of our primary is already bleaching the horizon.

  Nate’s voice is soft but it still makes me jump. I’d forgotten he was here.

  “This is my favorite time of day to be up here. The sunset isn’t bad, but you need to be in the other tower for that.”

  “What’s the problem? Is it locked or something?”

  He snorts. “Locks aren’t really a problem around here. The terminal is that way, though, and the area around it isn’t terribly scenic. We don’t have high-rise buildings on this bubble because that’d offend the second-classers’ aesthetic sensibilities, but we still have our slums. That’s where they house all the undesirables. Like our Rody, until he made good. And the terminal itself is only attractive if you like tech. Do you like tech?”

  I shrug. “Not really. Not as much as I like open space.”

  His forehead furrows. “Living on a tube must have really sucked, then.”

  This is another one of those Topics People Just Don’t Discuss but, again, the way he’s talking about it makes me want to stay in the conversation.

  “Yeah. It did. But I don’t have to go back and it got me here, so it was worth it, I guess.”

  “I’m damn glad of it. That you got here, I mean.” He says it like he means it, smiling down at me as if there was no cost to being that open.

  Rody and Dee turned up while I was distracted. They are admiring the view and talking softly to each other, arm in arm. I don’t have a word for the way I feel right now; all I know is that it’s so good it’s almost scary. Scrap the almost: it’s fucking scary. I don’t think I ever felt this good, and it would be so easy for all of this to go away. There are countless ways in which this could get fucked up, countless ways in which we could lose it all and end up back right were we started, only it’d be much worse this time because we have had this, we know how good life can be, so we would be dealing with the loss of it all on top of the never-ending shit of the world.

  Dee sidles up to me and puts her arm through mine.

 

 

  That’s not a lie. I give her arm a squeeze and pull away from her. I know she won’t appreciate that, but I don’t think I can stop my feelings from bleeding into my thoughts and I don’t want to ruin this for her. I want her happiness to be unclouded. I can worry enough for the both of us.

  When the primary peers over the crater, I blink in the light that floods the room and then pours itself over the town below us. It’s too beautiful for words. The most amazing part of it is that Dee and I are here, that we made it. Right now I don’t care about whatever happened to us back on Alecto and whatever challenges lie ahead of us: being here now is all that matters. This moment is worth it all.

  2.

  It takes us a handful of days to relax into our new schedule. School here is just like school back on Alecto, only more so. We have to jump through the hoops placed in front of us, and some of the hoops here are good fun.

  The combat classes are the best. I love them, even though I suck at them. Dee hates them, even though she’s very good. I always wanted to learn to hurt people more effectively and she doesn’t like hurting people at all, but Reggie fixed that for her. If he engineers a scenario in which someone is hurting someone defenseless, the other side of Dee’s caring nature comes out: she will do whatever it takes to protect the helpless, and if that requires the dismemberment of a bad person, that’s too bad. My goals are far less lofty: I want to stop being helpless. As I’m half the size of most people here, that isn’t so easy to achieve.

  That stops being as much of an issue when Reggie introduces us to weapons. A lot of the guys keep forgetting that they can use them, or feel bad about bringing them into play, while I never, ever do. I have no qualms whatsoever about cutting or blasting the shit out of someone who outmasses me or is trying to hurt me. Some of the guys act really shocked at my tactical decisions, but Reggie approves. He is awfully fond of reminding us that Patrolmen do not carry out routine law-enforcement duties: that’s what the local Guards are for. Patrolmen who find themselves in a hand-to-hand combat situation have already messed up. Carrying on that combat hand-to-hand would just be messing up more.

  He is also fond of reminding us that the punishment for assaulting a Fed Officer in the course of their duties is immediate, permanent removal from Fed property. That doesn’t sound so bad, except that the Fed own virtually all the bubbles, most of the stations, and the vast majority of the ships. Most people don’t even own a suit, let alone enough air to get them to one of the few non-Fed-owned places. Being removed from Fed property at short notice is, in essence, a sentence of death by spacing. The reframing makes it sound a bit cuddlier, I guess.

  It also makes it sound as if the Fed care about their Officers. I should find that reassuring. Instead I wonder how many incidents ended up in an Officer’s murder purely because it’s easier to hide a body than to silence a living person. I also wonder whether the Fed officials who put this rule in place didn’t consider this issue, perhaps because they weren’t sickos like me, or they considered it and were OK with it. All those speculations are pointless, anyway: the moral of the story is that if anyone lays hands on us during the performance of our duties, someone is going to die. We get no say in that, but we can help to make sure it’s not us.

  I don’t need to be reminded of any of that. Everyone in the universe over the age of twelve is bigger and stronger than me, I find pain painful, and weapons are my solution to both issues. That’s enough for me.

  Some of the guys don’t like the fact that I can suddenly beat them, at least some of the times. They like it even less when my blaster scores are way better than theirs. Dee’s are even better: she is so precise with her shooting that she gets upped a class without having to ask for it. I get upped, too, but barely. Nobody else in our class does. Some of the cadets congratulate us, some give us the stink eye, and most pretend that it didn’t happen or it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t surprise me in the least.

  We balance our success at the combat stuff with fucking up so badly at floating that we both get shunted into a remedial class. Dee is upset by that, but Rody talks her out of it: our only problem is that our instructor is an asshole and a bully. He decided that he wanted us to fuck up and he did everything in his power to achieve that. He yelled at Dee so much during her tr
ial run that I was glad I wasn’t in the tank with them, because I would have been tempted to disconnect his air hose. He did the same with me, and with all the guys he didn’t like at first sight: all the ones too quiet, too gentle, too happy, or too dark-skinned to fit his criteria for Patrolmen. I know he will continue to treat us like shit for the rest of the year, but that’s no skin off my nose. He hardly ever does any actual teaching, anyway, and he focuses on the students he considers worthy of his time, so he’s almost a non-issue. Most importantly, he can’t stop us from passing the Fed tests. That’s all I care about. I could get a job as a floater; it’s about the only physical work I could get into because my size wouldn’t matter so much, provided they’ve got a suit to fit me. Getting yelled at by an asshole in order to access those tests is just one of those things.

  Floating sucks, but the tech labs more than make up for it. We’re let loose around kit that I never thought I’d be allowed to look at, let alone dismantle. Given the chance, I’d spend most of my time in the labs, though that is partly because the lectures are awful. Most of them are so slow that they make me want to go to sleep. It’s pretty dry stuff, too, though it’s pertinent to what we’re supposed to be getting trained for. A grossly abridged history of the Fed. A highly detailed but ludicrously biased introduction to the Fed’s Trading Standards and Code of Conduct, so named because the gods would surely wreak havoc upon us all were we to admit that we have actual laws governing our behavior. Basic astrology and astrogation. Basic sociology, philosophy, and psychology. Basic everything, frankly: all the courses seem to either skim over subjects or require us to memorize content and regurgitate it on demand, regardless of whether we understand it or not. It’s all so tedious that Dee agrees to test out of them with me. That will give us more time for what we actually want to do: work at the Peacock so we can save up some credit to cover our asses if things go shitty, take the courses that can help us get proper jobs once we get thrown out of here, and shenanigans with the guys.

  The shenanigans are so much fun that for the first time ever I find it hard to keep my focus on what really matters. The guys’ room has become our living room, literally: it’s the room where we do most of our living. We spend all our free time there, even when the guys are not around. They told us we could. We don’t touch their stuff, obviously, we keep quiet when they’re studying, and we make up for our presence by bearing gifts – alcohol, mostly, though Nate is awfully partial to anything sweet. Still, it’s nice of them to be so cool about us being around. It’s just as well, because our roommates haven’t warmed up towards us.