Read A Few Good Men for Free Online

visible fuzz on my skin. Being blond it wouldn’t be too visible, I told myself, and as disreputable as I was likely to look, I wouldn’t be going to any part of any town where that would stick out. At worst people would think I was a junkie who had given up on his appearance. Plenty of those in any of the seedier areas of seacities. No one would notice, much less try to interfere with one of them.
    I ran my fingers through my hair. It is straight, and it had grown over the last fourteen years, to just touching the end of my spine. My choices for managing it had been to either let it grow as it had, or to rub the same cream on my scalp that I rubbed on my beard. I didn’t fancy a completely bald head, so I’d let the hair grow. Normally I combed it through with my fingers in the vibro, and then tied it back, making a knot out of it. I now did that, with a little more difficulty since there were salt tangles in it, and tied it low at the base of my cranium.
    Then I checked all my possessions and braved myself to face the fleshpots of Liberte. Right now the kind of flesh I was most interested in was a slice or two of beef and maybe some eggs, but fleshpots, a word from a religious book in the reading gems, seemed an appropriate term, nonetheless. They’d be teeming with all-too-corporeal humans, a strange and alarming idea for a man who’d consorted only with a ghost for fourteen years.
    I’d had time to get used to the idea—or at least that’s my explanation for why this time I managed to land without turning tail and bolting. I was still spooked—I still felt out of place. I still wanted to cringe and hide. But I’d stand my ground.
    It reminded me of when I was seven and Mom had insisted to my father that I be allowed to attend a big party the estate was giving for all the children of retainers, functionaries and servants. It had been a fateful party, in a way, because at that party I’d met Ben, who was exactly my age, and we’d found out that we lived a stone’s throw from each other, since his family’s relatively modest mansion was just across a side avenue from the palace. As it should be, since Ben’s much older brother and guardian, Samuel, was the main manager of my father’s properties and general factotum of his business and household. From there to one or the other of us studying how to get over the wall with the complicity of guards who had doubtless been told by my mother to leave us alone, was a matter of days, and after that we’d been inseparable.
    But part of the reason that Ben and I had taken to each other initially was that we’d both been hugging the fringes of the crowd, feeling strange, out of place and more than a little scared in the middle of that crowd of shrieking, running, talking children.
    I was then an only child, and would be for another eleven years, before Max was born. Given my birth status and the care that Father had with me—which even then seemed to be more concerned with keeping me alive than with keeping me in any way happy, or well educated, or even obedient—I was rarely allowed to see children, and I’d never been in the middle of a large group of them. Mine was a solitary childhood, carefully watched by nannies, and more exactingly educated by Mother, who taught me herself, as well as hiring tutors to teach me what she didn’t know. I’d enjoyed myself, in my own way, with reading and virtus programs, and playing in the garden, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to have no friends beside a rather dumb blond setter dog.
    Ben, in turn, was younger than his brother by more than twenty years, the last child, born of a second marriage, in a family of hereditary retainers to the Keevas. His life probably wasn’t as solitary as mine. He was allowed to play with a few of the better born children in the city. But like me he didn’t attend learning programs, and he didn’t meet up with any large number of children at one time.
    Entering that room, with a