Heinlein's Finches Read online

  The question is: how invested am I in sharing one of the most complex (apparently) aspects of my personality with two complete strangers, as opposed to, say, in retaining my own teeth? Do I care enough to risk a pasting?

  They’re frowning at me again, and I’m tired, and I’ve had a few shit weeks, and I’m in no mood for any extra crap in my life. So, logically, instead of keeping my damn trap shut, I let rip.

  “I was assigned male at birth. I see myself as an individual. I don’t identify as a man, or as a woman. I identify as me.

  “I do the work I can get paid for, and I’m pretty damn good at it. I wear whatever I want and do whatever I want with my hair. And if any of that doesn’t fit someone’s idea of what a biological man ‘should’ be, then the problem is with their view of masculinity, not with my style. If to be a man is to submit blindly to other people’s diktats, to look and behave like you’re told to, to subsume your own identity and preferences for the sake of fitting in, for the sake of a quiet life… Well, I don’t call that being a man. Or a woman. I call that being a coward and a weakling.”

  I’m not very good at self-editing when I’m roused. Goodbye, teeth.

  “However...” I thought I’d stopped, but apparently I hadn’t. “I probably wouldn’t tell them any of that. It would seem unfair. I mean, if someone is so damn weak that they can’t deal with other people living their lives the way they want to, so weak that other people’s private thoughts and feelings somehow affect their reality… Well, I wouldn’t want to hurt them by telling them the truth. It’d be too easy, and seem too cruel.”

  It was nice knowing me.

  The meat mountains stare at me for a couple of eons, then Number One elbows Cousin in the ribs, and they both start snickering.

  “Hurr, hurr, right, dood, hurr.” And so on.

  Then cousin frowns again and clears his throat, and the snickering stops. In a voice that sounds rusty from disuse, he asks “But you like boys, right?”

  Here we go again.

  “Boys and girls, actually. I like both. Well, men and women. Definitely not kids.” I shudder.

  Number One elbows cousin again. “Me, I like girls. My cousin like boys.”

  I have no script for this.

  “I have a girl at home, but he don’t have a boy. So he go down to dat fancy club in town, but they don’t treat him so good. Don’t let him in.”

  Cousin blushes and shuffles his feet. I’d never pictured a shaved gorilla blushing and shuffling his feet before.

  “The Peacock? Your cousin tried to get into The Peacock?”

  If this colony had first classers, which it doesn’t, half of them would still struggle to get into The Peacock. The fanciest club in town, they guarantee their own safety and comfort by the simple means of barring anyone who looks remotely like trouble. I barely got in myself, and I’m relatively polished. I think they only let me in because of my ethnicity; this colony is mostly Caucasian, so I stand out. Most of the time that kind of attitude pisses me off, but every now and then it’s damn convenient. I can imagine how they Peacock’s security team might have responded to a cadet fresh from grubbing who looks and acts like a zoo specimen.

  “Yes, dat club. They don’t treat him so good. So I tell my cousin, mabbe you go wid him. You, they let in. So he go in wid you.”

  I’m staring at them, blinking furiously. I thought I was going to get the shit beaten out of me, and instead these two gorillas guys want me to introduce them to the local gay scene. I assumed they were being prejudiced against me, while actually I was happily prejudiced against them. It’s taking so long for my brain to catch up with the facts that Cousin must assume that I’m going to decline, because his face drops. He looks like a bereft child.

  “Yes. Yes, sure, no problem. I’ll have to makes sure I can get the time off.” Cousin’s obvious delight is contagious. I can’t help smiling back at him. “You want to go tonight?” They look at each other briefly, and nod an enthusiastic affirmative. “Let me go and ask.”

  Asher and Gwen agree, which I expected, so after a quick change of clothes I find myself escorting my new friends Clint and Clarence to the Peacock Club. Clarence is immediately snapped up for a dance by a guy half his size and twice his age. Turns out that Clarence is actually a bit of a wiz at dancing. Terran formal dancing, that is. Stuff you actually have to learn and practice. I sit at a corner table with Clint, drinking, talking, and watching this mass of a man being twirled on the dance floor by a series of adoring men.

  The morning after, trying to meditate through my hangover is painful enough to make me rue the day I was born. But I don’t regret the night before.

  As soon as I start working on learning to spot people who are shielding, I realize that what’s simple in theory isn’t as easy in practice. I need to learn to re-tune my internal radio, kinda thing. In order to do so, I need to have something to focus on at the right ‘frequency’. A variety of different samples, ideally, so I don’t just learn to focus on a certain tune by mistake. I can’t do this on my own. I need people to shield in front of me, so I can see how it reads and learn to tune into it.

  The only people I can do this with are my four guys – Gwen, Asher, Nick, and Aiden – because they’re the only ones who know and can know about my psi-bility. That’s not a problem; they’re all willing to spend time with me trying to shield, letting me focus, then taking shields down, letting me focus again, et cetera. The problem is that the guys can’t really shield. At most, I’m getting a change in feeling – from whatever they felt originally to frustration, usually – but the intensity of their feelings doesn’t change. At any other time, this may be a rather interesting discovery; right now it’s just a pain in the ass. We’re spending a lot of time and effort into getting nowhere.

  Several frustrating days into this, we make a breakthrough while I’m training with Aiden. We’re in my anteroom, as per normal, and the Chancellor walks past, then walks back and thunders at us through the open door. “Adjunct Keaton! I was of the impression that you were working on the database acceleration project, whose deadline is fast approaching. I trust there isn’t any lack of clarity as to its importance.”

  Aiden snaps to near-military attention… and shields. “Yessir. Just back from your office. Made an appointment for progress report. Tomorrow afternoon. Sir.”

  “Good. I look forward to that,” and the Chancellor stomps off.

  As soon as he’s out of hearing, I squeak: “You did it, man! You shielded! I couldn’t see shit!”

  “Sure. Splendid.” He pats my shoulder stiffly as he gets up to leave. “Gotta go now. Gotta get admin to book me in to see Reggie. Gotta make some progress I can write a report about.”

  “You haven’t made an appointment? Haven’t got a report?”

  “Haven’t even looked at his damn project yet. Always some crap he urgently wants today and will forget about tomorrow. All the same. Gotta work.” And he speeds off.

  We now have something to work with. Everyone seems to have some kind of person they talk to while actually trying to avoid establishing a personal connection with. For most of us, thinking of the town guards seems to work. It’s just a case of accessing that headspace, and turning it on and off at will. That allows me to practice spotting when the guys are shielding, then to try and see the difference, then to try and keep hearing that unnatural silence while also scanning for other ‘frequencies’… And there’s where I run out of words.

  Forcing my psi-gift to change focus on command is extremely tiring. I keep getting the most awful headaches, and I’m starting to feel as if my brain is getting cross-eyed. But it’s starting to work. At least in the artificial settings we’re trying it in, it’s starting to work.

  We’ve been putting a lot of effort into this and I’ve started to feel optimistic about it. All the same, when it finally does work in real life, it takes me entirely by surprise. We’re walking Gwen to class. I’m just ahead of her and Asher is bringing up the rear. I’m trying
to do my depth/spread switch and walk at the same time, which is tricky, when I suddenly bump into someone I didn’t see. Literally. I walk right into a hulking brute of a guy as if he’d been invisible. I’m hardly small myself, so we shoulder each other hard enough to send each other spinning. We end up facing each other only a few feet apart. I realize that I’d felt him, but he’d felt absent. Flat. Shielded.

  My face must register more shock than normal, because the guy reacts suddenly and dramatically. I feel a quick, nasty surge of hatred, and he’s lunging at me with an arc blade in his hand. Time slows down. The corridor has fallen totally silent. I can’t even hear him, though his mouth is moving. He gets bigger and bigger the closer he gets. He is getting closer at that incredibly slow pace of his and the arc blade is getting closer too and I don’t want the damn thing anywhere near me and I have all the time in the world, so I throw my open left hand under his armed hand to catch his wrist and my open right hand to turn and push his jaw away to lever his head away because he’s so big now and getting bigger and closer and as I touch him I feel the darts leave my wrists and ages later there’s a hole where his throat used to be and the knife is slowly falling to the floor and he looks at me incredulously and silently screams for a year or so as he falls into me and past me and when he finally lands time clicks back into his proper place, and the corridor is flooded with noise and bright lights and people, and I’ve killed a man.

  There doesn’t seem to be anything sensible I could say or do, so I walk away to my office. Then I throw up. I think my body might have forgotten how to throw up because it keeps retching when there’s nothing there anymore, and maybe my insides will come out, but eventually it stops. So I clean up.

  I go to the Chancellor’s office and make my report. Asher and Gwen are there too. They say stuff. Then I go to my room. Eventually I fall asleep.

  The day after I take my floating lesson, monitor Gwen’s class, then go to work in Gwen’s anteroom. At lunch I sit at our table but everyone is just staring at me or looking away. Everything is muted and uncomfortable, but I have to stay here because Gwen is here. Then I go back to my anteroom. Then I go to my room and I sleep.

  The day after I do the same. And the day after that.

  I discover that if I focus really hard I can nearly disappear from my own meditation. I can go so far outside of myself that I’m barely there. It makes it easier to be here, to be me. Every day it gets easier to do what I need to be doing. I work, I eat, I train, I wash. Everything is going ok. Even sleeping is ok. Sleep is rest, and my body needs rests, so it takes it. I switch off, I switch on. After a couple of weeks, I think I’ve got this.

  I’m in my anteroom, working at my monitor, when Asher comes into the office. I figure he must be coming to see Gwen, so I barely look up. I hear them talking in her office. They walk to the exit door. I hear it click shut, which is odd. Then I hear a sigh, and look up to see that Asher is still there.

  “I need to go with Gwen,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

  “That’s covered. We need to talk.” He picks up my spare chair, brings it over to my desk, and sits himself down right next to it, nearly in front of me. I do not want him so close to me, looking at me, but I can’t do much about it.

  “Everyone is walking on eggshells around you because they think you feel bad. You killed a person, killing is bad, you’re a good person so you must feel bad.” He looks at me with a mixture of sadness and anger. “But that’s not it. That’s not it at all. They’re wrong.”

  I sit up in my chair and glare at him to make him go away, but it’s hard to act hostile towards someone who looks that sorrowful.

  “You don’t feel bad at all. You’ve killed a man and you don’t feel bad. You’ve repeated the little recording of his death in your head a million times, and you cannot feel bad about it. You tried to think of the life you took, the people he left behind; maybe parents, maybe siblings, maybe a partner. You feel bad for that, for them, but you don’t feel bad about the killing. You don’t feel bad and you know you’d do it again. And you think that makes you a monster.

  “I could tell you that that’s what a righteous person feels when they’re in the right. That you don’t feel bad because you’ve been an instrument of justice or some suchlike shit. But that would be bullshit. A bad person could feel the same. Good people doing good and bad people doing bad can feel the same neutrality. But I can tell you, as someone who knows you, someone who loves you,” I wince at that, “that you did what you had to do. You had no other choice but dying. You reacted out of instinct and training and desperation. Our bodies will do what it takes to stay alive, if they can, unless we stop them. And you were trained and armed and the opportunity came up and you did what you had to do.

  “You didn’t do it for credit or for glory or because it was the right thing. You didn’t even remember what you were doing there, did you? You forgot all about Gwen. You just acted in self-defense. And in doing so you destroyed your own self, a part of it, at least. The part who’d decided how you’d feel and think and act in this kind of situation.

  “So you cannot face your friends, because you believe that they think that you feel bad, that you should feel bad, and you don’t want them to see you unrepentant. You don’t want them to get to know this side of you. And you cannot face all the Academy meatheads who think that you’ve committed a heroic act, because you know that what you did was not heroic in the least. They believe that a real warrior would feel good about this. Fulfilling his role as protector. And you know that’s bullshit. You’re ashamed at what you feel and what you don’t feel. So you’ve wrapped yourself into yourself tighter and tighter and tried not to feel anything at all. A little death to pay for a big death.”

  My eyes hurt now and I’m not sure why.

  “But I tell you, anyone who hasn’t killed in self-defense has no idea how they’d feel, and those who have cannot expect you to feel as they did. I hope they wouldn’t even think of doing that.” He shakes his head. “Though some probably would.

  “And I can rationalize this for you, as a vet, and as the person whose soulmate you were protecting, and as your friend. But it wouldn’t go anywhere, because this isn’t rational, is it? But as your lover,” he shakes his head, “as someone who loves you, I beg you not to let anyone tell you how to feel. Not even yourself. And to read this.”

  He hands me his reader. I take it, but I’m not sure what he means.

  “Read it now. Please? It’s short.”

  I glance at the first few lines and exclaim “But it’s a children’s story!”

  “It’s a children’s story,” he nods. “Your adult self is fine. It’s your kid self who’s fucked up.”

  The story is about a father telling his daughter how he and her mother found her at a freak show, where she was on display as a werewolf baby. They were going to rescue her that night, but when they got there she’d already freed herself, fought off lions and zombies, and set the show on fire. The freak show didn’t want her anymore, because she was so fierce, so mom and dad took her away and raised her as their own.

  The girl doesn’t believe the story:

  “I don’t turn into a wolf! It’s a full moon right now!”

  “That’s a common myth, sweetheart. The real reason you turned into a wolf was because the people were mean. As long as you are loved and safe, you’ll be a little girl and you’ll always be loved with mom and me. But if anyone ever tries to hurt you, the wolf is going to come out.”

  There are a few more lines but I can’t read them. I’m crying and this awful, awful weight I didn’t know was there is breaking up in my chest and crushing my throat so I can’t breathe. Asher is reaching out to me but I get up and fall in front of him and I’m on my knees, with my head on his lap, and I sob into his legs so hard I think I’ll never stop, so hard I think I’ll break, and he just holds me until it all passes.

  The day after still sucks, but I can make eye contact with the guys, just. Although that
pain still twists my chest sometimes, not being alone with it is better. I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to them about this, but I actually believe that they’d listen.

  Sometimes I wonder what made Asher, well, Asher. Strong and capable and self-reliant and caring and giving and fragile and frightened and self-abandoning. I wonder what he was like before all that shit in ’68. I wonder about the Troubles, too. I mean, I have read the official reports – who hasn’t? But what they describe doesn’t go very far towards explaining the bundle of scars that is Asher, let alone the sheer number of broken people that came home. It just doesn’t quite tally. It doesn’t seem like the kind of conversation I should be starting, though. It feels like it should be up to him, and I shouldn’t push him. Though maybe he’s looking for me, for somebody, to ask. He doesn’t like to burden people.

  I wonder whether I could understand any of it, anyway. Asher was born on a tube and his folks were not only third-classers, but strictly Old Terran traditionalists. I understand those conditions in theory, but I don’t think I grok them fully. Gwen says that on Old Terra there was no place for men’s suffering. That the entrenched gender duality meant that women’s suffering was understood and accepted, even normalized, but men weren’t supposed to suffer in and on their own. They could suffer on behalf of other people; for the loss of a loved one, for instance. And, whatever was the cause, their suffering always had to result in some kind of doing. They could sink their suffering into putting things right or breaking everything in a berserker rage, but they had to be doing something.

  Either Asher wasn’t wired like that, or what happened to him didn’t fit that pattern. Anyway, his kind of suffering, his kind of brokenness, had no place in his culture. He knew that he couldn’t get any support from his family. Worse than that, he couldn’t get any support from himself.

  Gwen says that when he forgives himself for his feelings, maybe they’ll stop haunting him. She says that he’s not done forgiving himself for whom and what he is, for how he comes up short compared to his ideal of manhood. That seems so weird to me. He doesn’t treat anyone else like that. He wouldn’t stand for anyone treating anyone like that, either. But he does it to himself.