Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (29 page)

The Mules, having become the Good Men, could afford to have vast populations enhanced and not fear them, because the Mules, ultimately, didn’t care how many of their own creations they killed. Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? The ones who rebelled or who didn’t fully participate could be eliminated and the others would be kept on, with the threat of their bioimproving being revealed, of their not being safe, ever, except under the Good Men.

“How many people are there in Liberte?” I asked.

“Counting the territories?”

I nodded.

“Counting the territories in Europe and the Americas…Oh, thirty million or so,” he said. “Why?”

“Because,” I said. “We—and by that I mean enhanced people—are still a tiny minority. How could the people who tried to subvert this shelter and possibly the others attempt to rule everyone?”

Basil shrugged. “I don’t believe they were thinking so much. They were swayed. Told tales. You know, come to our side and we will give you power over the multitudes. You won’t have to hide—”

Simon said something under his breath. I thought it was “And the Devil took him to a high mountain.” Simon’s references and sources of inspiration were often thoroughly baffling. He drummed his fingers on the table. “More important than calculating how they could have come to believe this is to find out how many other people believed it.” he said, suddenly, and with these words he seemed to draw onto himself the mantel of authority, stopping being what he was—in fact, an unremarkable average-height man with average colored hair and eyes and skin—and seeming to command the attention of everyone in his presence. “And the most important thing to know is many of those people are in our supposed safe places; how many of these people are people we were counting on and, most all of, Basil, what I’d really like to know is how one tells the sheep from the goats.”

Basil somehow changed, as Simon changed, going from being the confident leader of this base, to being a subordinate, and one who was none too sure of his ground. I couldn’t imagine why, except there was something about Simon’s easy assumption of authority that carried its own conviction with it.

“That’s all very easy to say,” he said. “But the truth is if they were careful enough to have nothing in writing, or to have hidden the writings they did have, we’ll never find out.”

Simon looked thunderous. “Which leaves us in the unenviable position of trying to move while we don’t know which of our forces we can trust.”

“Move?” Basil said. “You mean…counterattack? We don’t have nearly enough people for that. We thought…”

“You thought Brisbois was just creating a place for me to hide? Several places?”

Basil shrugged. “I thought—undercover work? Slow?”

“To be fair,” Brisbois said. “That is what we thought too. That if the Sans Culottes should escape your control it would take us years to regain the city proper, let alone the territories.”

Simon touched the bridge of his nose with his index finger. I got the feeling he was trying to collect his thoughts, as his inner voice rebelled against that idea of slow and careful infiltration. I wondered if that was how the man he had been cloned from had done it. Surely that would fit his personality type, engineered and educated into him by those who had created him: to be a spy, a chameleon, to manipulate from the outside, slowly moving inside, without ever revealing himself. But Simon didn’t have the same education. Simon was not the original of his genes.

“We thought,” Brisbois said, “that you could use the shelters to hide in, use the people in them as your infiltrators, slowly work to create a freer government, one which wouldn’t kill people at least. We thought—”

“Alexis, for the love of Liberte, stop saying
we
as though that meant something. Unless you’ve acquired multiple personality disorder call it what it is: you thought and you decided. The fact that you were right about the likelihood the Sans Culottes would be corrupted and taken over by your ex-wife does not make me feel better about your initiative. And I’m not sure you shouldn’t have thought about another plan.”

Alexis opened his hands. I thought that living under an autocratic master who had the power of life and death over you, for any reason or none at all, the man should have developed…fear. That he hadn’t, that he was answering Simon’s rebuke as a rebuke not a threat said a lot about him. And a lot about Simon, I thought, whose character was the sole guarantor of Alexis life in these circumstances. “I said ‘we,’” he said ponderously. “And I meant ‘we.’” He looked up, a look of stern determination on his plain face. “Look, Simon, this is what your father—what the old Good Man did when he felt the crash coming, when he suspected that there might not be a berth in the
Je Reviens
for him. This is how he planned to survive, and how he ultimately survived.”

I thought,
So I was right,
at the same time that Simon looked up startled. “And he managed it, damn him,” Simon said. “To become a prisoner of his role and far too interested in power to ever let go. But, Alexis, I don’t intend to artificially extend my life.”

“It’s not prolongation,” Alexis said, “You’re enhanced for exceptionally long life. All the Mules were. But the Good Men don’t need longevity, see, so much as pretending they’re like everyone else. If I understood Fa—Doctor Dufort properly, your kind, and maybe ours, though I never asked, could easily expect to live two or three hundred years. To pretend your son inherited would only be needed if you were hiding your essential nature as…ah…created, not born.”

Simon opened his mouth and I thought he was going to dispute the not-born thing. After all, he’d been born, even if by a surrogate. But suddenly there was a look as though the weight of the world had fallen on his shoulders. “Damn you, Alexis. I don’t want to imitate my soi-disant father. If I thought that’s what awaited me, I’d blow my brains clean out, before you could force me into that position. I want to—”

“Pan for gold in the territories,” Brisbois said, and there was a hint of teasing to his voice, much like an older sibling amused at the younger sibling’s childish dreams. I thought they’d quite forgotten Basil, and Mailys, and even Jonathan LaForce, who was following all of this in grim silence, his mouth tightly compressed, his dark eyebrows low over his eyes.

He made an explosive sound at Brisbois’s rejoinder, but didn’t say anything, and his noise—likely involuntary—got no more than a puzzled frown from Basil.

“No,” Simon said. “Not that. I mean, not my ambitions, but what I want for Liberte, what must be done. I want to stop the killings. I want to make sure there is a semi-sane regime in place. I’m not an idealist, and I’m not religious, like the Usaians, which is why I never joined, despite Abigail Remy’s proselytizing. I’m a realist and I’ve read enough history to understand that there is no perfect regime, not here, not ever. There are accommodations people make to survive for the next century, the next decade, or the next week.

“I know my history well. I know a well-run dictatorship can be better than a badly run democracy. We have examples aplenty of it. Multiplying the judgement of morons doesn’t suddenly make them geniuses, and most people are at best average, and even geniuses can be morons when it comes to governing others.

“I joined the Sans Culottes because they had started up already and they had a romantic vision of the government of old France. That’s fine. The Usaians have a mystical vision of the government of the old North America, even though from sources of the time, the regime worked most often in the breach. It made sense—just like the Usaians believe in the substance of their form of government and ignore the faults in it—the new Sans Culottes preferred to believe that the problems with the revolution, the massacres, the fights, were incidental and not endemic to the system.

“I had a slightly different idea. I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t quite. When you try to make everyone equal in results, it’s going to end in blood. It always has. But the thing is, I thought it
might
work. I thought it had a chance. The regime of my late, unlamented progenitor had leveled a lot of the differences between people, when it came right down to the essentials. Yes, some people were richer than others, but all lived about the same lifestyle, except for my esteemed Père. Only it didn’t stay that way. The Usaians—damn them—and their propaganda coup revealed that the Good Men are the same as the Mules, the same as the biolords back to the twenty-first century. Not the same in questionable ethics and power grabbing, but the same in everything but name. And that let all the demons of Hell loose upon my kind. And the demons of my kind, too, those who think we should rule humanity. Alexis, I don’t know what you meant, but the last thing I want to do is to repeat the whole miserable cycle.”

“Well, there,” Alexis said, and opened his hands on the table. His hands looked incongruous on the polished table, too large, too calloused, too blunt-fingered. “I didn’t intend for you to become like…like the previous ruler. I didn’t intend for you to be a ruler at all. Your peculiar talents of subversion can be used in the task of creating a better government, as well as a more or less autocratic one. That’s all I meant for you to do.”

Jonathan LaForce’s eyebrows seemed to lower still more, till all that was visible of his eyes was a vague glint beneath them. But he didn’t say anything and I thought neither Alexis nor Simon were aware of him. Nor of the rest of us.

I cleared my throat and both turned to look at me.

“The thing is,” I said. “You don’t have time for that. Whatever you thought Simon was going to do, Brisbois, and whatever Simon would like or would not like to do is all for naught. Jonathan says, and I believe him, that forces are massing to come and crush Liberte. Or more specifically, to crush the revolution and to install a Good Man in Simon’s place, since he’s presumed dead.

“The forces of the Good Men could not have hoped to invade and defeat Liberte when it was functioning, as you told me the night of the ball.” Was that only a few days ago? It seemed like a lifetime. “They were occupied with their war on the Usaians, too busy to commit to a war with us also. But now it’s not a war. This seacity is a smoldering ruin, and Madame’s forces aren’t able to control day-to-day crime. In another two days, the invaders will probably be greeted as liberators. In a week, they surely will, and, correct me if I’m wrong, the usual method of taking over a seacity is to have the Good Man invading kill everyone capable of resisting, right? And then everything goes on as usual.”

“So?” Simon said. “What do you suggest we should do about it?” It struck me that he was unusually serious, then I realized it wasn’t seriousness, so much, as the fact that maybe for the first time he was talking to me as he talked to Alexis. There wasn’t even the slightest appreciative glint in his eyes.

I found the rest of the room looking at me. It wasn’t a new experience. In the past, at home, I’d often felt responsible for coming up with an action plan, and people tended to respond by expecting me to say or do something. The difference was that now I really didn’t have any idea what to do.

The first thoughts that came to mind was that this was not my world and not my problem. But I’d involved myself in its destinies, put myself in peril and put them in peril too, to try to save Simon. Which meant in a way it was my responsibility. Because I’d taken it.

More than that, I intended to stay on this world. It had been a necessary decision to avoid my own troubles back home. But the decision had troubles of its own. It had given me a chance to escape attempts to marry me off to someone whose only qualification was being genetically engineered for a job complementary to the one I’d been created and taught to do. On the other hand, I couldn’t say I’d much appreciate living under the regime of the Good Men. In fact, I wouldn’t appreciate it at all.

And if the Good Men swallowed Liberte, a very likely circumstance at this point in time, they were just as likely to tamp down the Usaians and the remaining foci of rebellion. Each seacity, each parcel of territories returned to the
ancien regime
would mean that much more chance of the old ways winning. At any rate, there is an inertia in the affairs of humans, that tends to pull people towards what’s familiar, well known, and therefore seen as safe.

I started talking, more for the sake of outlining things as I saw them than to say anything of substance. But everyone expected me to say something productive, or at least Simon was looking at me expectantly, so I said, “If the Good Men take over Liberte, and they could do it walking at this point, it will be that much easier to stop all the other rebellions. And then their regime will return.”

I saw Brisbois’s face compose itself into something like shock. I didn’t know if he was reacting to my saying it aloud or to my saying it at all; whether he thought it was shocking I would dare to voice it, or if he’d never thought of it before. I responded with something that answered both instances. “Well,” I said. “They have managed to hold power for three hundred years. Longer, if you count the time before the Turmoils. They were designed for it, you might say. Why do you think they won’t return to it? Surely there have been rebellions before. I didn’t study your history, but I’ve overheard…”

Simon made a noise. “Isolated,” he said. “Small. Not—” His voice seemed to strangle upon itself, as though the import of what he was saying had just hit him. “I take your meaning. If they isolate us, they will tamp down this one too.”

“They have isolated you,” I said. “To an extent. All right, maybe it wasn’t the Good Men alone, but the rebellion within the seacity made it dangerous for other rebels like the Usaians to help you, and that in turn made it more likely that they would win each battle separately.”

It seemed to me Simon had grown paler and, considering his general pallor from lack of sleep, it was saying something. It made him look sickly. He said something under his breath. I thought it was
“Merde.”
Then took a deep breath. “So, our top priority,” he said, “is to put down the rebellion.”

I felt like I was kicking a puppy, but the truth must be told. “Oh, no,” I said. “That was your priority…a couple of days ago. You didn’t.”