A Song Called Youth (100 page)

She led him into an alley, into another street, and into a debris-choked entrance to a Metro station. After much worming and climbing and walking in darkness (all the while Roseland feeling he would die if he took another step, but somehow always taking another step), they came up in a ruined building, and she took him through some doors. There was some argument at the doors in French, but they went through.

They were brought to a lean man missing an ear. A man whom Roseland knew immediately as an American. Knew without knowing how.

“Monsieur Torrence,” the woman said, introducing the stranger.

Roseland said, “My name is Abraham Roseland. Give me a gun. Give me a fucking gun.”

And then he collapsed.

Merino, an island in the Caribbean.

Jack Smoke, a tall man with a hawk nose and sharp black eyes, walked on a long-legged drooping gait across the tarmac to the transport plane; he was walking more slowly than he would have liked so that the little girl carrying the crow could keep up with him. Her name was Alouette; she was about ten. She was the color of a polished coconut shell, her wavy black hair tied up under a sky-blue scarf. Smoke wore an identical scarf around his neck. Both of them wore short-sleeve white shirts, shorts, and sandals.

“You said we could go swimming again before we took the plane,” she said. She made it sting by saying it matter-of-factly.

She had too many of the adult tricks, Smoke thought. There are advantages to having a gifted child, and disadvantages. But he’d never regretted adopting Alouette.

“We’re not taking this plane yet. We will go swimming before we leave the island,” he promised, glancing at the sky. It was a warm day, but the subtropical island was sheeted over with a thin cloud cover, and there was a brisk wind. Weather report said a storm was coming; he hoped it would take its time, and not make him a liar. “We’re going out to this plane to see the reporter from MediaSat.”

“Oh. You could’ve told me before.”

“You were too busy bragging about your chip access level.”

“Wasn’t bragging.”

“You were too.”

“No, wasn’t.” She took his hand and kissed it. The crow, nestled in the crook of her other arm, made a crotchety caw. “Hush, Richard,” she told the crow. “We’re going to see a television man.”

Hand, the digital-TV man. Smoke had seen Witcher’s file on him. Hand’s real name was Nguyen Hinh. Rising young muckraking our-man-in-the-field for the relatively new MediaSat, an Indie that had taken advantage of the big Worldtalk shakeup to carve out a broadcasting niche. Hinh was known to his ratings share as Norman Hand.

Nguyen Hinh. US citizen. Father was Vietnamese, mother American, thirty-two years old. Got his degree at NYU in media studies, was a member of the Democratic Party with a history of voting for party moderates. Nice head of hair, vocationally color-streaked for that streetside identity cachet. Mostly round eyes, pretty blond skin, boyish, said to be gay but not remotely effeminate, at least on camera. Suits were printouts but not stenciled. High-quality designer prints, the kind you get in your clothes printer only if you’re a platinum-card subscriber. Hinh was chic but not snobbish enough to wear real cloth.

Highly ambitious. Probably not interested in the New Resistance story for partisan reasons.

Hand was posed in the shade of the forward-swept wing of the fat-bellied blue and white jet, talking intensely into the little fist-size camera standing on a thin collapsible tripod. His black technicki cameraman hunched over the viewfinder, making minute adjustments.

Behind Hand, islanders directed by a Witcher employee loaded plastic crates from a luggage tractor onto a portable conveyor belt carrying them into the plane. A swaying robot arm whirred from the plane, grasped the crates in its immense tri-fingered metal hand, and hoisted them into place. The crates swung precariously in the robot’s grip, but somehow were snugged exactly into the optimum packing configuration. Muscular backs bare and sweat-glossy, the human laborers worked in concert with the cybernetic laborer as comfortably as rice farmers with a water buffalo.

Smoke gestured for Alouette to be quiet, and the two of them waited behind the cameraman for Hand to finish his taping.

“What you see,” Hand was saying, “is a small piece of an exodus; the final preparations for an exodus from an island—an island which must remain unspecified—which has been a haven for this intriguing band of guerrillas, now on the run from, so they allege, an illegal international force of crypto-Fascists. Their destination: somewhere distant and secret; their timetable: immediate and desperate.” His voice was deep, resonant, and utterly confident.

He paused and then spoke to the gray-jumpsuited technicki. “Go to the sound bite.”

“Gah,” the technicki said. Meaning,
Got it.
He made an adjustment and said, “Go.”

“NR guerrillas—getting out, and fast. In a hurry like Moses’ people, but this time it’s the supposed Fascists playing Pharaoh’s Army. Where are the rebels headed? We don’t know where, but we know when.
Now.
In a helluva hurry.”

He paused, then nodded to the technicki, who tweaked the mouse. “Down,” he said, nodding.

Smoke knew the drill. One recording for the upperclass public-TV seg, the smallest demographic slice, known as the C viewers; then the sound bite for impatient, hungry middle America, the A viewers: the biggest slice. The last for the semiliterate, the technickis, the B viewers. Other variants would be computer-dubbed in Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Farsi, Arabic, Ebonics.

“NuRillas,” Hand was saying in Technicki. “Gedouwf, hidgoodn’gone, s’pose fash hanimerdown—dunhu buhwheh. Hup.”

Hand paused, then nodded at the technicki. “That’s it.” He turned, smiled at Smoke, widened his smile for Alouette. Behind him the loading machinery went whir, click, clack. “Mr. Smoke. Good to meet you in the flesh.” His voice off-camera was higher, daintier.

“Likewise. That was recorded? You’re not linked, I trust?”

“Right. Your people’d scotch it anyway.” He winked.

Smoke smiled. “We’d sure try. You can send it when we’re home free.”

“You ready for that interview?”

“We could do a preliminary here, but I’d like to do the bulk of the thing in our media center, so you can see what we’ve got.”

Hand seemed to consider, then touched a corner of his jaw, spoke into his implant. “You got that, anchor? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well no, we’re not going to let them stage a—Right. No, there’s no ER.” His eyes flicked at Smoke; Smoke knew what ER meant. It wasn’t Emergency Room, it was Editing Rights. He was going to have to take whatever they dished out and hope it looked good. That was the deal. MediaSat was the only overGrid outfit interested in covering the story. Too much of a downer, too unprovable, and too rhetorical, was what the others said. The lefties from the underGrid covered them, but who cared? They had the ears of a tiny slice of the populace. The Internet stories of an ongoing New Holocaust in Europe, after all, were countered by the authorities, were dismissed by most people as hoaxes. “Okay, just get that comparison segment ready so we can—yeah.” He tapped his jaw joint again, walked toward Smoke, hand out, his smile like a cool breeze as he went to Alouette. “Lead the way, young lady!”

She shook his hand, staring at him. “Your voice changed,” she said.

“When I was sixteen,” he said, winking.

Only a few monitors and the linkup mainframe remained in the comm room of the Merino NR headquarters. Hand’s technicki had interfaced with the linkup system so they could intercut NR video as needed. But the camera wasn’t on yet. Smoke sat across from Hand, who was trying to soften the chill that had set into the room after Hand had let slip this was going to be only a fifteen-minute segment and not the hour special he’d hinted at.

“You can’t make people understand in fifteen minutes that they’ve lost a continent to Nazis when they weren’t looking,” Smoke said. “It’s too big to comprehend, too big to believe without proof. People have this blind faith in the Grid, in media—if their media hasn’t told them it’s happened, then they believe it hasn’t happened. There’s this myth that everything is ‘covered’, everything is reported on, that free media is everywhere. It’s been a myth since the last century. And everyone believes the myth. In the face of that—we need at least an hour to get even close to proving it. Lord, just to lay the groundwork.”

“You’ll have a basis for starting,” Hand said. “A springboard. It’ll prompt more media interest . . . ”

“Bullshit,” Smoke said. “The president slithered out of impeachment. She saw the country through a war so they don’t want to hear about her connections to a bunch of right-wing extremists. Okay, they tell us, so she got a little panicky and went too far, World War Three was on, could happen to anyone. So let’s put this nasty talk of Fascists behind us and look to the sunny future and . . . the whole schtick. I’ve heard it two hundred times.”

“Maybe they’ve got a point?” Like a psychotherapist, putting it as a gentle question.

“More bullshit. It’s just denial, Hand. American media and American foreign policy hide from the truth because they’re tired of conflict and maybe because they’re hoping the bastards’ll take care of the Third World émigré problem for them—”

“That comes off pretty paranoid. The Second Alliance corporate people were jailed or deported or had to jump the country, Smoke. It’s hard to believe they’re much of a threat. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and we’ll cover it from your angle, but—”

“ ‘Much of a threat!’ They’re running France. Germany now. Italy. England soon ”

“England? I was just there. Travel lines are beginning to open, I didn’t see any jackboots. Certainly no concentration camps.”

“In England, it’s just beginning. Why do you think no outsiders can travel in France, Italy—”

“They say it’s because of the aftermath of the war. No functional airports yet, cholera, various other diseases, bands of hungry desperadoes—”

“Since when did those kinds of restrictions ever stop media coverage before? What happened to ‘fearless war correspondents’?”

“Look, we’re wasting a lot of good material here. We should be getting this on camera. Let’s see where it takes us, okay?” Hand’s most open, winning expression. It bounced off Smoke like a bubble, and Hand let it slide. His face went blank. “Yes or no?”

Smoke snorted. “Let’s do it. Maybe you’ll see . . . ”

Hand nodded to the camera technicki, then raised a hand for a pause. He took out a hand mirror, checked his media-flesh and his makeup, put the mirror away, then pointed at the camera.

“Go, “ the technicki said.

Hand conducted the interview in a soft combination of phrasings for A and C viewers. “Mr. Smoke, the public relations division of your organization claims that”—he glanced down at a printout on his lap—“there’s an ongoing apartheid throughout Western Europe fast becoming a genocidal Holocaust.” He looked up at Smoke. “World War Two Redux?”

“It’s not a replay of World War Two, obviously, except in the genocidal sense—and even there it’s different. Its ideological foundations are more a distortion of sociobiology than what we knew as old-style Fascist racism. Then again, to some extent it’s rooted in an extreme form of Christian fundamentalism. And as for its execution, it’s enormously broader. It applies to vast numbers of Arab and Persian and Pakistani immigrants, to Hindus and Muslims from India, to blacks and gays and Jews. Of course, more people than Jews were persecuted by Nazis during the Second World War, but the scale—”

“Whoa, chill out long enough to explain to us how something like this could go on unreported under the noses of the governments and media of Western Europe, of American forces who are still stationed along the front of the war—and most of all, Israel—”

“It hasn’t gone on unreported. It’s there on the alternative stations, on social media, a great many places. Mainstream media is treating it as a conspiracy theory. But that’s not what it is. We’ve got statements from hundreds of soldiers, including fifty-two officers, complaining of the ‘apartheid methods’ of the Second Alliance and SPOES . . . ”

“The ‘Self Policing Organization of European States . . . ’ ”

“Yes. Second Alliance sympathizers in the NATO high command suppressed the reports, saw to it they never reached Congress or the UN. Censorship is easy to justify in those conditions.”

“A media blackout over a whole continent? That’s a little hard to swallow.”

“It’s not necessary over the whole continent. What was the last communiqué you saw from France that wasn’t from the US military or, say, from the Larousse government? Most of the lines of communication are down. Unauthorized sat-transers were destroyed, cables cut, and fone relay towers down. Travel is still restricted ‘until order is restored.’ And the question is, what
kind
of order will be restored?”

“And Israel is just standing by as Jews are rounded up—”

“Israel has repeatedly demanded investigations into the stories of new death camps and these so-called ‘refugee processing centers.’ It’s hard for them to go in alone and establish the truth without violating international law. They are assisting us on a certain level. They may well go further . . . ”

“We have a new US senator,” Hand put in, referring to the printout again, “Senator Jæger, who says, and I quote, ‘These NR people are trying to foment a dangerous postwar hysteria, and if you ask me, the whole thing is a leftist fund-raising device.’ How about that? I mean, isn’t it in your interest to convince people for fund-raising reasons that there’s another Holocaust going on, Jack?”

Smoke bit down on his temper till it stopped writhing to get free of his mouth. Finally he said, “It’s in the interest of stopping the Holocaust,
Norman.
Senator Jæger’s company manufactures the Jægernauts used by the SA to destroy the homes and lives of thousands of innocent people. He’s hardly an objective opinion. Why hasn’t the UN been shown the charter for SPOES?”

“Ah, right. They’re more or less like Interpol was, I believe—”

“No. It’s a military alliance which I believe is the blueprint for a single Fascist state uniting Western Europe.”