A Few Good Men Read Online Free PDF

captivity. I touched the suit over where the gems and reader sat.
    As the skyline of Liberte became visible in the horizon, I had a momentary pang for the society of humans. There were humans in Liberte. Not many of them. I don’t think the entire seacity ever had more than a million inhabitants. It wasn’t really a seacity like Syracuse, or even Olympus, colonized in levels and populated by both rulers and bureaucracy and workers.
    Liberte owned another seacity whole—Shangri-la, which had been a mobile seacity in the old days—and Shangri-la was the working seacity, with industry and farming all around it. In Liberte the apparatus of state and its functionaries resided, and the island, carefully landscaped in slopes and terraces, looked like a garden, carefully cultivated from its Good Man’s residence at the summit to the white sand beaches disappearing into the carefully kept-clear waters.
    This is not to say the island didn’t have a seedier part. Of course it did. Not only did the maids and gardeners have to live somewhere, but cheaper restaurants and hotels will appear to cater to them, and other service industries of a less strictly approved of kind will spring up, unbidden, to cater to all classes of inhabitants.
    For a moment I was taken with a physical, almost aching, craving for that type of service, or to be honest, for someone I could pay enough to let me hold him through the night. Just the idea of warm body in my arms appealed to me with the same intensity as food appeals to a starving man.
    When I was a child or a young man, I didn’t particularly like to be touched. Oh, I endured it from some people, my mother most of all, since she liked to hug me and brush my hair with her fingers. And later I enjoyed it from lovers.
    But I didn’t know it was possible to crave just the touch of human flesh, of human warmth, even when it didn’t mean sex or even affection—just the idea of being held by another human made me ache with need.
    I managed to get within sight of the shores of Liberte.
    And then the sound hit me. I can’t explain it. It was, I think, the sound of any inhabited area.
    Music and voices, the hum of flyers, the roar of the occasional boat beneath, whistles and honks, all melded and fused into a low roar. It should have been welcoming and familiar.
    It should, but I’d spent fourteen years hearing nothing but the occasional distant, echoing voice, too far away to be able to identify the words. The noise made me shake. My hands clenched very hard on the broom again.
    I told myself I was being an idiot. But my body clenched and my mind panicked at the thought, at the idea of all those people—all of them near me, moving, talking.
    I couldn’t. It was too much. Too much noise, too much movement, too much light.
    The broom had somehow turned itself around and I was headed out to open ocean, and Ben protested in my mind, Luce! You have to conquer it. You can’t live on open sea.
    And I tried to tell him I needed more time, I needed more courage, I needed—
    Meanwhile I was flying fast, fast, away from the city, away from all the cities. Away from humanity.
    After a while I saw a small islet in the ocean. I flew over a small group of isles, and found it. Though it wasn’t small enough to be underwater at high tide, it was small enough that I doubted there had ever been a human habitation there. Fishermen from the nearer large island might come there if there was good fishing around it, but—as I drew near and realized how craggy its sides were—that was unlikely, since mooring there would be a right bitch. Perhaps courting couples flew out there now and then to picnic, but I doubted that too. As I got nearer and saw it was little more than black rock jutting out of the sea, with some mosslike growths in its lowest spots, and a lot of seagulls gathered on it and flying around it. Their cries were deafening in the air.
    I stopped on the highest crag, and sat on it, watching the sun setting.