Si Vis Pacem (Heinlein's Finches) Page 7

  When the term results are published, people assume that there’s been a mistake. I’ve been so good at making myself invisible that hardly anyone has even registered that I exist, let alone that I may be worthy of any consideration. My name means nothing to them. My grades don’t mean anything at all, because they don’t make sense. People read them and ignore them, because they don’t understand what they are looking at.

  At the start of my first term I was a first-year student, just like the hundreds of kids my age in the general study pool. By the end of it, I’ve gained enough course points to class as a fifth-year. My score average is not perfect. That is partly by design, because I didn’t want to antagonize the instructors, and partly because I just couldn’t manage that. I could pass classes as fast as possible or get top grades, but not both. That vexes me. I’ve done it, though; I made it. I’m not fifteen yet and I’m out of the general study pool, past the mass lectures, straight into the specialist classes. I’ve already picked the courses I would like to attend, but if that doesn’t work out it doesn’t matter. I can’t leave here until I’m eighteen, anyway. I have enough time left that I can take just about every course they offer, if I want to. And I do.

  Knowledge is power. Being the only one of something is power, too, when it makes you exceptional – exceptionally valued, rather than just an oddity. Suddenly anything that’s done to me is done to the only first-year student to graduate basic ed in one term. I’ve always been fucking obvious if anyone cared to look hard enough, always been the only one of me, but from today I’m obvious and special.

  When the news finally gets around, I know about it. I spend the rest of the day in a cloud of whispers. I get called into a meeting with the Station Captain so I can be told what I already know. I will be moved out of the dorms. I will attend actual classes, with actual instructors. I should be thankful that the Fed have given me this wonderful opportunity to improve myself. All my instructors are amazing, as my achievements demonstrate. It doesn’t matter that not one of them ever talked to me: what I have achieved clearly highlights the superiority of their instruction. It’s all bullshit, but the Captain now knows my name. She knows what I look like. She knows that I exist. She has a use for me. I’m not untouchable, but touching me has suddenly gotten costly.

  Some of the kids still don’t get it, so I have to explain it to them. They collar me in a hallway, six of them, fourth and fifth years. The oldest kid is doing the talking – the oldest man, because they’re men, not kids, they are adult males and any one of them could break me physically and mentally so thoroughly that maybe I’d never put myself back together again. I know that better than they do. They aren’t happy with what I did. They know it can’t be undone, but they want me to fully appreciate their displeasure. They haven’t worked out who I am yet, though. They haven’t worked out how expensive fucking with me could be. So I tell them. I tell them that they can beat me and rape me, of course they can, but if they don’t kill me I’ll talk and the Fed will listen, because there’s only one of me, because nobody else has done what I just did. I wouldn’t talk if they killed me, or if they smashed me up so bad that I couldn’t, but that’d be the end of them, too, because my death would be investigated, because today the Fed know I exist. They’ll forget again tomorrow, but for today they care.

  Is it worth it, really? Is the pleasure of beating up a kid so small that anyone could beat her worth a week in solitary? Is killing me worth a spacing? There’s so much meat out there, cheap meat, meat to beat and fuck at no cost. I’m expensive. Am I worth it, really?

  I say it to them, calmly, clearly, and politely. I don’t beg. I don’t plead. I don’t threaten. Just the facts.

  The older ones look at each other, shake their heads, and walk away. One of the younger ones tries to protest and gets a punch on the ear for his troubles. They walk away from me without a backward glance.

  When I find myself alone in the hallway I suddenly feel so fucking tired and wired that I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again, but if I do it might be forever. I still my face, though, still my body, make sure I’m back to neutral. Then I walk over to my dorm, pick up my stuff, and take it to my new room. I am going to have a room, with a door. No lock on it, but anyone who enters it without permission would be breaking a rule. Whether I could make that stick is a whole other story, but I’m out of the dorms and out of the shadow. I have my own place and my own space. They can all come at me, but it’ll cost them.

  When I get to my new room, everyone else is still at lectures. This is what I’ve earned through busting my ass for weeks on end, and it’s so unprepossessing it would be disheartening were it not so much better than what I just left.

  It’s a two-person room. There’s a bunk bed against the back wall. At the foot end of it is a small desk, so you can sit on the bed and do your work or whatever. Squeezing into the top one must be a challenge for normally-sized people, but it won’t be a problem for me. Underneath the mattresses is a row of drawers. They seem to be the only available storage. That will also not be a problem for me, because I own hardly anything.

  The room overall is barely twice the size of the bed, and it’s not a terribly wide bed. It’s cramped, utilitarian, and Spartan. It’s also a room with a door, a room where I can get in and have only one person to deal with. That’s going to be the crucial point, I guess: will I get on with them? I have to, one way or the other, but my life will be much more pleasant if we could actually get along.

  I’d really like to know more about who my roommate is. The more I know, the more I can do to avoid starting off on the wrong foot. I have no intention to start my residence here by sniffing around someone’s private stuff, partly because it’s a shitty thing to do and partly because it’d be seriously problematic if I got caught at it, but I have no compunction about looking at the stuff that’s out in full sight. There’s not much of it, which makes sense: around here anything that isn’t worthless or nailed down gets stolen.

  The wall behind the bottom bunk is absolutely covered in drawings – actual drawings, made by hand on what looks like paper. Where this person got paper and pens from, that I’d like to know. Some of the drawings are really good, from what I can tell: flowers and animals, and a whole set of tree outlines against a changing sky. I wonder if it’s a tree they actually saw, something from a holo, or a figment of their imagination. The pictures I like the most are dark, indistinct shapes from which bright squares shine out. I am not sure that’s what they’re supposed to be, but they remind me of the houses back home, after dusk.

  I’m looking at one of the pictures, trying to work out which corner of our fields would have given me that view of my old house, when a low giggle makes me jump up. I turn around, and she’s there, leaning against the doorway with a smirk on her face. I know who she is – I don’t know her as such, same as I don’t know anyone here, but I’ve noticed her around. It’s hard not to. The percentage of people with darker skin than mine around here is pretty low. She’s taller than most other girls, too. Hell, she’s even taller than a bunch of the guys.

  “I’m sorry. I was just checking out those drawings.”

  “No problem.” She sounds like she means it. “They don’t wear off for looking at them, thought they can smudge if you touch them. Do you like them?”

  “Yes. Did you draw them?”

  “Yup.” Her smile is so white and so wide that her face looks like it’s going to split open.

  “I’m Heaven Pax. I’m supposed to live here now.”

  “I know. I heard. Everyone is talking about you.”

  “I hope that’s OK with you.”

  She takes the few steps towards her bed and sits herself down. The woman moves like a cat – not just because she’s so quiet that she genuinely took me by surprise, but because of how graceful and self-possessed she is. I am kind of jealous. Compared to her I feel uncoordinated, jagged and stiff. Her smile is really pretty, too.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sure we can make i
t work, if you’re that way inclined.” She sticks her hand out to me. “My name is Deeqa Isaaq.”

  The “q” in her name is unlike any sound I’ve ever made. It sounds more like a pipe unclogging than anything that should come out of a human, and I am not entirely sure I can replicate it. I’m still trying to get my mouth working around it without actually sounding it out, in case I mess it up, when she giggles.

  “I go by Dee. It stops people dislocating their jaws.”

  “Cool. I go by Pax. It stops making me gag.”

  “Don’t much like your given name, hey?”

  “Nope. You’re allowed to use it, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  Her smile flares up for an instant, then suddenly fades at the edges. “Honey, you don’t know who I am, do you? You seem way too comfortable with this arrangement.”

  Before I’ve had a chance to ask her what the hell she’s on about there’s a knock on the door frame and two girls barge in. I’ve seen them around: they are two of the older, prettier girls, the ones who have steady guys who’d fight for them if necessary. Touching them, saying the wrong thing to them, even looking at them in a way they disapprove of is to get into a whole world of shit. They stand either side of the doorway and through the gap they left another girl walks in. I know her too – well, no, I don’t know her and I made damn sure that she doesn’t know me either, but I know who she is. She’s the acknowledged queen of this side of the dorm. She’s only a year four, but she’s shacked up with one of the older guys, a serious bone-breaker, and she can hold her own, anyway. I’d respect the hell out of her for getting where she is if I didn’t know that she’s also a giant bitch. To be part of her inner circle is to be treated like first classers. To be at the edges of her group is to be treated like muck. To be in the middle echelons is to survive by enforcing the system: by kowtowing to those deemed more important than you while making sure that those who are less important feel it.

  There is no part of that system I want to belong to, not even the top levels. I don’t want to be that kind of person. I also don’t want to antagonize anyone, if I can help it, and particularly not someone who could stomp me flat. I’m not entirely sure that pacific coexistence is going to be an option, though.

  The queen’s perfect nose wrinkles when she looks down it at Dee, as if she smelled something bad. I’m expecting some shit to go down but I’m wrong: she turns away from Dee as if she was completely insignificant and beams me the fakest smile I’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing.

  “You must be Pax. I’m Matthews.”

  “Hi.”

  “We heard all about your test results. They’re… Unusual.”

  I shrug. “You do what you gotta do.”

  She shows more teeth. “A lot of guys won’t like that.”

  “Oh. I can’t say that I thought about that.”

  “That’s something we could help you with. Working out how things are around here. You help us, we help you. That’s how you get along.”

  I nod, purely because I don’t know what I can say that won’t make this worse, but she seems to take it as assent. She flicks her eyes over Dee and makes that bad-smell face again.

  “We could help you with this, too.”

  “This what?”

  “We could get you a decent room.”

  Dee is just sitting there on her bed, perfectly composed and quiet, as if nothing was going on, as if they weren’t openly talking about her as if she was some kind of pestilence. I understand what she’s doing and why, but the whole thing still pisses me off. She can play nice if she wants to. Right now, I don’t have it in me.

  “This room is just fine for me.”

  The Queen’s eyes narrow. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Either way, that’s not your concern.”

  “My concern?” She stands up straighter. “Anything that happens in this hallway is my concern.”

  “Sorry to hear that. That sounds tiring.”

  “You don’t know who you’re talking to.”

  “You’re probably right, but I’m fine with that. You came here. I’m not trying to talk to you.”

  All the prettiness disappears from her face as rage fills it. “Nobody talks to me like that.”

  “Fine by me. I have no wish to talk to you at all. That was my point.”

  “You are going to regret this. I promise you that.”

  “That’s possible.”

  She stares at me like she can’t make out what I’m saying, or what species I am. The other two girls are staring at the floor as if it was about to open up and swallow us all.

  The Queen raises her chin even higher. “This is not the end of it.”

  I’m seriously about done with this conversation, so I say nothing. After a suitably dramatic pause, she twirls around and flounces off. Her minions follow her.

  Dee flops back on her bed, her eyes huge.

  “Oh, honey. Way to make dangerous enemies.”

  “She’s not as dangerous as all that.”

  “She practically runs this place!”

  “Sure. But I intend to have as little to do with her as I can, and for her to have just as little to do with me. There’s nothing she has that I want. I’m not afraid of her.”

  “Maybe you should be.”

  “Maybe. But then she’d have already won. We’ll see. I’m planning to be unimportant enough for her not to bother with me.”

  “You insulted her in front of her underlings.”

  “Unintentionally. Had I wanted to insult her, that would have known.”

  Dee’s eyes go back to her normal size and her smile reappears. “I look forward to seeing that. From a safe distance, ideally. Have you had dinner?”

  “Not yet. I was going to go and hit the terminals.”

  “What? Why? You’re taking proper classes now, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, but there are a couple of extra classes I want to take.”

  “On top of your regular classes?”

  “Yeah. They’re interesting. I don’t have to be back till curfew, right?”

  “Yes. But this isn’t the dormitories. You can stay in your room as much as you want, as long as you don’t have classes.”

  “Noted. I’ve got work I want to do, is all.

  “And you’re going to do it over dinner?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Most people use that time to eat.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  She stares at me for a couple of seconds and shrugs. “I think I see that.”

  We walk to the refectory together, chatting as we go. We get a few weird stares, but that could be for any number of reasons: me being me, her being her, us being together, and the gods know what else. After we’ve collected our meals, she goes to sit down at her usual table; one of those where the rejects sit together to eat alone. I eat a few bits while I walk back to the tray return point, then I go to the study room.

  I come back to my room in plenty of time to get a decent shower. Our ‘fresher breaks are not as tightly timed as in the dorms and I’m hoping that the lower people-to-showers ration will mean that I won’t get kicked out as soon as I’m done.

  I find Dee on her bed, curled up like a cat, doodling on a scrap of paper. When I walk in she looks up and smiles at me. Either she’s a good actor or she’s happy to see me. I find myself oddly not unhappy to see her. It’s weird and I don’t like it.

  “How did your studying go?”

  “Alright.” I clamber up the ladder and pull my towel and robe out.

  “Is it that time of night already?”

  “Sure is. If you don’t get on with it you’ll miss our slot.”

  She flows up from the bed in a single, smooth movement and stretches.

  “Thank you. I always lose track of the time.”

  “For me it always seems to crawl.”

  “It does that for me too, at times, but never when I’m drawing.”

&nb
sp; We walk down to the ‘fresher together. It feels both weird and nice, and that’s weird. I’m still trying to work out whether that second load of weirdness is recursive or exponential when we get there. She picks a stall and I pick another – and gods, but it’s nice to be able to wash behind closed doors. I’m just starting to forget about all the weirdness that awaits me back at the room and enjoy the nearly-warm wash I’m getting when a noise outside makes my ears prick up. Some people just walked in. Several people, by the sound of it. And none of them seem to be doing anything ‘fresher-related.

  I peer through the gap in the stall door. The Queen is there, surrounded by a gaggle of minions. I can count eight from this angle, but there could be more. This is profoundly ungood.

  I get myself dressed – if I’m going to take a pasting, I’d rather do it clothed – and step out. Dee opens her door but stays inside. She doesn’t look happy, but she doesn’t look scared, either. That’s useful.

  The Queen ignores Dee entirely and takes a step towards me.

  “We don’t like dirty lezzies here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’re a fucking lesbian.”

  “Am I?”

  “Why the hell would you hang out with a freak like her if you’re not?”

  “Right now we’re using a communal washing facility at the same time. I think it takes a bit more to make someone a lesbian. I mean, you lot are here too.”

  She snarls. “Whatever. You’re both dirty lezzies. And you’re a freak-fucker. Admit it.”

  “I could, but I’d be lying.”

  “We’re not gonna let you out until you do.”

  “We’re in for a long evening, then.”

  “Oh yeah?” She strikes a pretty pose and smiles. “Tell you what. You can show us how you do it, then we’ll let you out.”