Heinlein's Finches Page 3

  The length of training is proportional to the potential a cadet displays. Those we deem suited only for crewing and back-up duties normally graduate within a year. They’re usually happy to do so, too. Training here is free, naturally; it’s hard to believe that on old Terra it was possible for people to buy the privilege of learning, regardless of their aptitude. However, training cadets don’t earn anything and they can’t contribute to their colonies of origin in labor. They are a net loss to their home communities, the communities that have invested so much to ensure their survival to adulthood. Even for those chicks who were glad to leave their colonies and never plan to return, it matters. Colonists aren’t raised to be parasites. We pay our debts. Very few concepts have followed us across space, but Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL – there ain't no such thing as a free lunch – is a guaranteed constant in any colony world. Any surviving one, that is. Tube people… Well, the upper classes can be way too relaxed about this kind of thing, but they still know that their air isn’t free.

  Cadets who manage to graduate after their first year consider themselves to be the privileged ones. They become Probationary Patrolmen – working, earning Probationary Patrolmen – in the shortest possible amount of time. As instructors, all we can do is hope and pray that the training they receive here will see them through their two years’ probation.

  Those retained for a second year are those selected for specific duties that simply take that long to master. Their loss in income isn’t offset by any higher status or pay – Patrolmen only advance on service merit – but their life expectancy, particularly in the earlier years of service, is better.

  Third years, though… To be a third year often means that someone is too awkward to fit into any of the Patrol’s normal roles. They may be not-quite-good-enough at some aspects of their training, yet show an abnormal aptitude at some other aspects. They may never make Patrolmen, but the Patrol may make use of them, yet. Some of them are deemed to meet a requirement of the Academy itself. Sometimes the Academy realizes that it has a requirement only after the right person to meet it materializes. For a lumbering, bureaucratic, paramilitary organization, we’re pragmatic enough to be flexible when needed. So odd ducks who are abnormally good at something essential but also abnormally crap at something essential – like me with zero g work – get given the dubious title of ‘Adjuncts’ and a wage to match, and put out to perform whatever they’re good at. The vagueness of it all saves a lot of embarrassment all round; what would my title be, ‘secretary, quasi-psi-prod-nose and counselor, and unskilled bodyguard’? That’d never fit on my office door. If I had an office of my own, and a door.

  This year’s third years are a great bunch of people. Half of them are already here, and already clearly busy. I slide my tray on the table and throw myself into a chair. “You’ve started without me? What is it this time?”

  Nick is the first to answer, as always. “It’s the start of the year, so we’re doing proxemics again. We’re trying to determine which of the chicks are grubs and which are tubers based solely on how close they stand to each other. Winner gets the pot.”

  Aiden interjects with a shudder. “Tube people are so in your face. Predicting first year dorm fights.”

  “And beddings!” Nick cuts in enthusiastically. “Don’t forget the beddings!” General guffawing ensues. “What did I say now?” Nick looks around in genuine confusion.

  Nick is our new floating Adjunct. Last year was his third year. He’s an odd duck amongst odd ducks, actually, because he graduated and served only to be pulled back to the Academy to be an instructor. That was Asher’s work – they flew together, way back when, and Asher knew that Nick’s floating style would make him a good fit. I think Asher also knew that Nick’s fast-and-loose approach to discipline was making him a terrible fit in the Patrol proper.

  Nick is probably a quarter as good a floater as Asher, so he’s the second best we’ve got and a damn sight better than anyone else. Tall, well-muscled, blonde, with a dimple right in the middle of his perfect chin and bright green eyes, Nick is the looker of our bunch. As a cadet, he earned a reputation as a terminal playboy by the simple means of sleeping with most female cadets, though the reputation may be ultimately unfair. Nick does nothing to conquer women; they just seem to throw themselves at him, and he doesn’t bother to dodge.

  Aiden is his not-quite-double. Equally tall and muscled, equally good looking, with baby blue eyes and jet black hair, he could very well rival Nick’s activities, but he doesn’t have any inclination of the sort. He’s our best up-and-coming engineer, and he seems wholly focused on his work and his friendship with Nick. The two are virtually inseparable when not at work, and when Nick isn’t otherwise engaged. A couple of times, a couple of ladies have tried to score a double, as it were. Aiden didn’t seem to notice it. Nick looked unusually tired the day after.

  Aiden is mock-explaining to Nick why we’re all finding his pronouncements amusing when I spot Gwen coming out of the service corridor. She collects her tray, exchanging a few sentences with the serving lady. As she walks past the Proctor’s table, she exchanges a few words with the Chancellor, with no change whatsoever in her body language. I’m willing to bet that her tone didn’t change either, though her register may have. I don’t know if she realizes how insulting her behavior is – to treat a servant and the Chancellor in the same way is to treat the Chancellor like a servant. Although we are a meritocracy and her merit is firmly established, I sometimes wish she’d at least pretend to play the game. You won’t get anywhere in the Academy just by kissing ass, that’s true; but I don’t know how far you can get without kissing ass at all.

  Gwen saunters over to our table, scribbles on a napkin, and passes it to me. When I open it, I read “three across, two down, second seat facing us.” And that’s the spot where the red-haired hater is sitting.

  I swear she’d not given the entire room more than a passing glance. I don’t know how she does it, and for the umpteenth time I wonder whether her alleged lack of psi-bilities could be simply the result of her cheating the tests. But that’s not the important issue here.

  I nod and she sighs. “Any more?”

  “Not that I could spot.”

  Asher has walked in too, late as always, surrounded by a gaggle of advanced floaters. You always know when the floaters have landed. Even in the crowded refectory they manage to be too loud, too ebullient, and to take up too much space. Eventually Asher manages to disentangle himself from his adoring students, picks up a tray, and finally makes his way towards us. The hardest part of managing his schedule is to prevent him from spending too much time teaching. Although zero g may feel and look like his natural environment, his body was designed for Terra. Prolonged exposure to zero g, combined with his long stay at our comfortable 0.8 g, could result in serious physical consequences. Even in the short term, too much floating doesn’t do him any good. I watch him walking towards us now, and something in his gait is not quite right.

  When he gets to our table, he sets the tray down and places his scarred hand on the base of Gwen’s neck. When she turns to greet him, he bends down to kiss her on the forehead, the only outward manifestation of their feelings they will allow themselves in public, and still a huge breach of protocol.

  “Milady,” he murmurs against her hair, “I believe a red-headed Viking is very unhappy with you.”

  How does he do it? I’ve watched him from the moment he entered the refectory. He was chatting and laughing, shaking hands and bumping fists, and generally not paying any attention whatsoever to anything or anyone other than the people he was interacting with. Yet he spotted that guy, too. And I’m supposed to be protecting these people?

  “Remind me again what the fuck I’m doing here?” I splutter. “You sure as hell don’t need my nonexistent fighting skills, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I see that you don’t.”

  Asher leans his cheek against Gwen’s hair. “Nah. You know stuff. I get hunches. I don’t give myself perm
ission to act out on hunches. And I don’t want to act too late. Not when the stakes are this high.”

  Gwen turns around to look at me. “I do. I did, anyway. Act out on hunches, I mean. I still would, but the social costs tend to be excessive.”

  “So my role in life is to do what, confirm what you already know? Provide social validations for your actions?”

  She squints at me. “If you think that wouldn’t be enough, then you need to think again. But no, that’s not just it. You’re here to give us an edge. You’ve just done that. Oh, Quinn. I love you dearly, but sometimes you terrify me.”

  “Eh? What?”

  “You don’t get scared enough.”

  “I get scared plenty!”

  “Maybe you get scared. But you don’t get scared enough.” She sighs. “Oh, forget about it. I’m in a shitty mood. Knowing that someone may want to bump me off gets me in a shitty mood. I must be a terrible person. Bite me. And you,” she turns to Asher and gives him a pointed look, “you look like your rubber bands are wound up too tight. Again. How many hours were you in there today?”

  He looks like a schoolchild found shirking his chores. “A tiny little bit over, maybe, but I needed to set the new course. Oh. Nick!” Nick turns to look at him. “That three-point contraction-rotation” and he makes a hand gesture incomprehensible to most of us, but Nick nods eagerly. “Do you think it would work fully suited?”

  “Hmm. Leisure suits, for sure. Work suits, maybe. Battle suits, I doubt it. But if you changed it to this,” and he makes another incomprehensible gesture, “then it might work.”

  They go on, talking over each other so fast no one can follow them, cutting each other mid-sentence with words and hand gestures, winding each other up, feeding off each other’s energy, and having a grand time, until Gwen clears her throat.

  “So. Should I expect you to be doing some climbing, after you’ve sat down and eaten your lunch?” she asks in a tone that isn’t asking.

  Asher pulls that guilty schoolchild look, but only fleetingly, and then beams at Nick. “You haven’t seen the new route up the tower yet! I set it up while you were away! It takes in the overhang on the fifth floor!” They would wind each other up again if Gwen didn’t clear her throat.

  “Food. Eat. Now.”

  Asher pulls a face but sits down and starts shoveling food into his mouth. Gwen pats his arm, and he rolls his eyes at her. His expression grows somber. “So, what are we going to do about this Viking chap?”

  “Not much we can do, until he does something first,” shrugs Gwen.

  “I do wish the Academy would take the issue at bit more seriously,” retorts Asher. “It’s somewhat frustrating to have to wait for someone to actually try to harm you before I can do something about it.”

  “What’s the alternative? Imprisoning people for thought crimes? Feel-crimes? We’ve been over this. And anyway, they’re taking it seriously enough to issue me with my very own psi-gifted bodyguard. They’re doing all they can, and doing any more would make us the bad guys.”

  “Well, I don’t have to like it,” says Asher, pushing his empty tray away. For someone who hates to sit down and eat, he does so with remarkable efficiency. “So now we just wait for him to make a false move.”

  “And until then, my protector and I will be on high alert. No capers, no silliness…”

  “No eluding the protector to get up to gods’ know what,” I interject, looking at the ceiling. Asher giggles.

  “I said no silliness, didn’t I? And I meant it,” frowns Gwen.

  “Then we’re all as set as we can be,” sighs Asher. “Shall we be off? You’ve got work, I’m sure, and I have some climbing to do.”

  We both give him a disgusted look. Asher climbs because he has to, according to him. All the serious floaters do it now. Aside from the fitness aspect of the exercise, there’s something about engaging in an activity which puts them so completely at gravity’s mercy that is apparently particularly good at resetting their brains. But Asher also climbs because he’s an adrenaline junkie. The only reason the Chancellor didn’t burst a coronary about his installation of climbing routes up the tower is that they look too dangerous to be a real security threat. Anyone that skilled would get up there anyway, and everyone not skilled enough we can just scrape off the cobbles.

  When Asher talks about feeding his addiction as if it were a chore, he sounds less than convincing. Meanwhile, Gwen and I actually have real work to get to; tedious work being inherently more ‘real’, obviously. I need to file in a report to the Chancellor detailing today’s findings, and I cannot help feeling that I’m missing something critical. We all get up to return our trays and make our way down the main corridor.

  When it happens, it seems to come out of nowhere. The corridor is packed and Asher has to greet about half the school, so he’s dragging behind. Gwen is swimming through the crowd, as she always does. I’m trying to keep up with her but can’t without trampling people, which I could do without much effort but always seems poor form. I can barely see her ahead of me; she’s so much smaller than everyone else.

  I’m not in any kind of meditative state, but I can still feel the sudden surge of hatred in front of us; hatred so intense it burns cold. The red-haired guy is falling onto Gwen, swinging an arc knife at her throat, shouting “Death to the heathen wh…” But he never gets to finish the sentence, because Gwen has stepped into him, pushed her open hand on his chest, and made a hole in it. I only realize what has happened after he's fallen over, his initial momentum carrying him past her. There’s no mistaking the dart sticking out of his chest.

  Gwen is standing over him, her face blank. Asher catches up with us, a blade in his hand. I just stand there, limp and vacant, waiting for my brain to catch up. I hardly felt it coming. I did, however, feel it leaving.

  The drawback of being able to feel people’s emotions is, well, feeling people’s emotions. Even with my shields up, sometimes I cannot block what’s being emitted. Turns out that dying people are loud – until they stop being altogether.

  I’ve never felt anything like this before. I could deal with the pain. It didn’t last long, and I’m used to people hurting. But I can’t deal with the sheer finality of it all.

  While some of the cadets huddle together and some perform a perfectly pointless health check on what is now clearly a corpse, because no living human has an expandable energy dart the size of a fist embedded in his smoking chest, Gwen comes to me. She comes to comfort me. To see if I’m ok. I’m tasked with one thing: keeping her safe. She just had to kill a would-be assassin, while I was spacing out. And now she’s looking after me.

  So, this is what being worse than useless feels like.

  The Proctors descend upon us, sending cadets on to their classes. The corpse is unceremoniously dragged out of sight through the nearest service door by two of the service staff. The Academy snaps back into life as if nothing had happened. One of the Proctors comes over to tell us that the Chancellor would like to see us in his office. As if we needed telling.

  Chancellor Reginald Williams is undeniably capable and competent. The Academy has thrived under his leadership. However, I find it hard to think of him as an actual person. He’s some kind of force of nature. Not a supernova, although his explosions are violent enough. Maybe a volcano, because his eruptions are recurrent. Gwen is one of a handful of people not in mortal fear of him. I don’t think the two of them realize how similar they actually are. I also don’t think pointing that out to either of them would be healthy.

  The meeting starts out badly, and quickly degenerates.

  “So you just went ahead and killed a cadet in the corridor, in a crowd, on the first day of class,” booms the Chancellor.

  “He was coming at me with an arc knife! Those things can cut through anything! What would you have me do?”

  Asher interjects: “Could we maybe spare some time to find out how a cadet came to carry an arc knife on campus? What happened to security?”


  “The same security our own Professors are flaunting? A dart gun?”

  Gwen snaps. “A contact dart gun. The only weapon I can think of with no risk of injury to anyone but the intended target. Would you have preferred it if I’d used a knife, see who got whom first? A blaster? Or a Terran gun? See how many bystanders I can injure?”

  “I would prefer it if the security measures we already had put into place showed any sign of working.” The Chancellor turns to me. “What of this waste of space here? Is there any chance of you ever justifying the wages you draw?”

  “Adjunct Taua,” Gwen states in a sharp, clipped voice, “gave me the warning that saved my life. Do you think I go around with a dart gun strapped to my arm day in, day out?”

  I noticed that she’s framed the last sentence as a question. She hasn’t said that she hasn’t been carrying a dart gun… And I recall some odd strap marks I’ve noticed on her arms during the holidays. I’d thought at the time that Asher and her must had gotten into some kink they hadn’t yet seen fit to share with me.

  “You had identified the threat?” The Chancellor glares at me.

  “Yes, Chancellor,” I manage to stammer.

  “And after identifying the threat, informed me immediately. We were just on our way to your office to report this when I got jumped. Would you have preferred it if I hadn’t defended myself?” She’s shouting now, in a towering rage and still processing unspent adrenaline.

  “I would prefer it,” the Chancellor bellows back, “if we were not the kind of educational institution where Professors murder cadets in public on the first day of class!”

  This is clearly an unjust accusation. I expect Gwen to hit the roof, and Asher to follow. But she pauses, holds her breath for a few counts, lets out a long sigh, and I feel her rage dissipate.

  “Of course. You’re right. This should have never happened.” Her agreement is so earnest, so complete, that the Chancellor doesn’t have anything left to hang his rage on. The atmosphere in the room clears so suddenly that I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.