A Song Called Youth (126 page)

“We
do
matter—we liberate concentration camps. We give people hope. It matters. And the race-selective virus—they are far from being ready to deploy it, so far as we can tell. There’s still time. I understand how you feel, Danny. We all feel that way sometimes. But we’ve saved lives. We’ve saved other lives by destroying their computer files. We’ve delayed them seriously. And Bibisch saved Hand and the other witnesses. They’re important—especially Hand. He could make the difference. We’d never have got him through if she hadn’t taken out that gunship when she did. It would have shot the transport out of the sky—the SA reinforcements would have come. We’d all be dead and all Hand’s witnessing would be lost, if not for her. She was the only one who reacted fast enough. She wasn’t
wasted,
Dan. Her sacrifice mattered.”

Torrence leaned back and closed his eyes. And tried to believe it.

Steinfeld went on. “Listen—she asked for something just before she went into surgery. It’s kind of . . . perhaps a little grotesque. But it seemed important to her. She said if she didn’t make it . . . ”

Torrence opened his eyes, saw Steinfeld looking confused and embarrassed. “Well?”

“She wants you to have one of her ears.”

“What?”

“With her love.”

“Her ear?”

“Something about Van Gogh. And you missing an ear. She said you looked like an alley cat after a bad fight all the time, with that ear shot off. What I mean is—she wanted to have one of her ears transplanted onto you, to replace the one you lost. The visible ear. They’ll mold it with surgery to make it symmetrical with your other one, use grafting and tissue-bonding agents to get it to, ah, take once it’s implanted and . . . You see, it would actually be quite helpful. We’re tired of looking at you. Frankly”—he smiled grimly—“we’re sick of your face.”

New York City.

“Apparently, I got out of Paris in the nick of time,” Smoke said. “They had some trouble there after I left. Just a day after.”

“You are okay?” Alouette’s image compressed and expanded like an accordion, yawed left and right, and then stabilized. Mexico had notoriously bad fone transmission.

“Yes, I’m all right. No one even shot at me. But some of the others . . . ” He broke off, wondering how much to tell her. She was still just a kid. She’d stayed in the hospital with him after he’d been wounded in D.C.; she knew about the danger to him, and to the resistance. But maybe it was best he didn’t tell her about the massacre at the train. “It’s worked out all right,” he finished lamely.

Smoke was in the relatively modest suite Badoit kept at the New York Fuji-Hilton, leaning back in an easy chair, looking out through the glass wall at the sunset breaking though the Manhattan skyline. In this smoggy sunset light, the city looked like a cluster of red-hot smokestacks. He was tired, jet-lagged, but was fighting sleep. He had too much to do. He hadn’t even unpacked yet. He tapped a console to order espresso from a serving table beside the chair. A plastic cup emerged from a chute; a jet shpritzed hot black espresso.

“Are
you
okay, Alouette?”

“Yes. I miss you. Someone here, he wants to see you.” She clucked her tongue, chirped in Merinese at someone off-camera. The crow hopped onto her arm, tilting its head with one of those birdlike movements that was like bad cartoon animation: not enough frames per second.

“Well, hello, Richard,” Smoke said.

The crow shook itself and made a raucous noise in its throat. Smoke grinned. He remembered when the bird had come to him in Amsterdam on that ruined balcony. They’d both survived a great deal since then. The crow was a link to a Jack Smoke who seemed like a dream now—a homeless, half-mad babbler to birds.

“Are you going to come and see me?” Alouette said. Sounding as if she might cry.

Smoke said, “Soon! Um—as soon as I can. I’m about to start a media blitz, try and get Grid-Entry for . . . ” He hesitated, unsure as to how secure this line was. Especially since this was Badoit’s suite. Badoit had his share of enemies. He didn’t want to even say Hand’s name. “A campaign to explain to people what’s really going on over there.”

She nodded. “You have a guard?”

“Yes. A bodyguard.” He sipped espresso. Not bad for out of a cred-vend machine. “He’s doing push-ups in the next room.”

It was a lie. He should have a bodyguard, and didn’t. Bodyguards made him feel conspicuous, and that feeling was scarier to him than the risk of going without a bodyguard. And he didn’t think the enemy knew he was here.

“Okay. You come and see me soon?”

“Yes. Are you studying hard?”

“I’m learning so much. You want me to show you some chip readouts? Ask me a math question. I can tell you what day of the week it’ll be, any day of any Year—like April twelfth, the year 3503.”

“Never mind.” Thinking that the chips made people into a variation of autistic savants. “I believe you. I heard you did some trans-Atlantic work with our Jerome-X.”

“They didn’t have anybody in London that processed genetic cores as good as me.”

“Do you know what it was you were processing?”

“No. Something about germs.”

“Uh-huh.” Good. He didn’t want her to know what that was about if she didn’t have to. She had enough to be afraid of. He sipped more espresso. The sun went down, the sunset drawing in on itself like a hermit crab into a shell; the adumbration of night made itself known over the city: lights became more brilliant, shone out of the city’s deeper places like the reflective pupils of Rousseau jungle animals. More and more lights shone, more clearly electric now; each one marking a person, or people.

He wondered how close the SA was to using the racially selective virus. He wondered how many of those lights would be switched off when they used it.

It might be a dark city soon.

“On satellite news they said you had an acid rainstorm there,” she said. Looking more excited than worried.

“Yes. It delayed the plane. A particularly acidic storm. That sort can be deadly for the homeless over a period of hours, I hear. The rains aren’t so bad this year, though, as the last five years. The stuff’s finally beginning to work its way out of the biosphere, I suppose. Global warming complicates things so it’s hard to say for sure . . . ”

“They waited too long to make the laws.”

“Yes. For those kinds of laws, they always do. Have you got someone to play with there?”

“Julio plays with me. He showed me how to catch a scorpion in the desert.”

“What! Isn’t anybody
watching
the kids in that facility? Is Bettina there?”

“She’s not back from London yet. Tomorrow.”

“Tell her to call me. And don’t go playing with scorpions in the desert, Alouette.”

In any sense,
he thought,
don’t play with scorpions in the desert.

Paris.

Roseland wanted to hit Pasolini. He wanted to scream at her. She was so fucking sure of herself. And God, she loved being in charge.

They were in what had been a security monitoring room for the old Metro subway system. The portable, caged electric lights were hanging on the hook in the doorframe by their orange industrial extension cords, parasitically drawing on cables NR techs had exposed in the cracked concrete ceiling of the old station. Roseland and Pasolini and two other NR were sitting cross-legged on the floor across from the little computer screen they’d patched into the city’s one working channel. Watching the Unity Party news on “unconfirmed reports of the capture of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.” The Fascists, gloating about their omniscience. No one escaped the long arm of the Special Police. And so forth.

Fuck you,
Roseland thought.
I got away. Torrence will too.

“Pasolini—Torrence is important to us. He’s like a linchpin. Ask Lespere if you don’t believe me. I don’t think you’re considering this in an unbiased way. We’ve got to get him out.”

“And lose how many people? It’s foolish. He got himself caught—he walked into it like an imbecile.”

“He was trying to liberate some prisoners—”

“He should never have come back to Paris so soon. It was stupid! He had a bandage on his head in that picture. I think he must have had some brain damage. Stupid. No, I will not risk everything to try to get a single man out of SA prison. Do you know how many political prisoners they have? They are all important to me. Just as important as Torrence. They have
children
in prison—”

“Torrence is valuable to the Resistance.”

“Not that much.”

“You’re prejudiced against him. You were rivals. Think past your own biases, Pasolini.”

“I said
no.
Steinfeld made the chain of command quite clear. If you don’t like it—” She waved her stubby Russian cigarette imperiously. “—find another cause.”

“This is more my cause than yours—”

“Oh, your precious Jewish heritage. The martyrs of the world.”

“Don’t give me any of your anti-Semitic shit, Pasolini, or I swear to God I’ll put a . . . ” He broke off, staring at the TV. “Oh, shit.”

They saw Dan Torrence on TV. He was marched out across a prison compound. A doll-size Torrence on a little, snowy TV screen in the corner of a concrete floor—an image of someone they knew intimately, seeming like a stranger, like some video-abstracted figure from TV news. Treated like just another faceless terrorist caught out in the floodlights.

And marched into the featureless brown building. The camera, hand-held and wobbling, following them into the gas chamber. Something more ignominious about gassing an enemy of the state—less heroic than putting him in front of a firing squad. The Second Alliance had chosen the means of execution thoughtfully.

“And what have they learned from him, with their extractors?” Pasolini was saying.

The commentator speaking in a low, serious voice, and in French, but Roseland knew the sort of thing being said.
The criminal shows no emotion as he is taken to his death; he has had every opportunity to express remorse, and has shunned those opportunities . . . There is, perhaps, even a sneer on his face as he is led into the chamber . . . But now we see the truth behind the mask as his cowardice shows, and he begins to panic . . . 

Roseland thinking: God. Dan looked awful. Sunken, sick. What have they done to him? Broken him with torture. Must have been dead for days, psychologically.

Roseland stood up, walked to the screen, and kicked it in.

Whop,
the screen imploding. Glass tinkling to the floor. Sparks and a burning smell.

“Idiota!”
Pasolini shouted.

Roseland turned and started for the door—then he stopped, staring at the monitors on the old Metro security console. The resistance techs had rigged the cameras to work again—and they showed armed men coming down the corridor, too far from the camera to see clearly.

“Intruders,” Roseland said, grabbing his Royal Army surplus Enfield. He ran out onto the disused Metro platform, scuffing through the plaster dust that had fallen during the shellings, shouting at the guerrillas playing cards near the stairs. “Company coming!”

Pasolini was beside him, shouting orders. Roseland was rounding a corner, running up the ramp the intruders were coming down. Somewhere in the back of his head, Roseland as thinking,
Do it now. Take some of these assholes out, push ’em.
Not quite thinking, consciously, the rest of it:

Make them kill you.

Because seeing Torrence marched into the gas chamber had been one death too many. It was time to join his friends . . . 

He was halfway up the ramp when the intruders rounded a corner. He raised his rifle.

And recognized Steinfeld. “Shit!” He stopped, staring. Steinfeld and four other guerrillas, including a Japanese guy. “I almost blew you assholes away! Why didn’t you signal down?”

“We did,” Steinfeld said. “No one acknowledged. Where’s your communications man?”

“Uh—watching the execution on TV, I guess. We were distracted. Torrence . . . ”

“I know.” Steinfeld came closer, the others at his heels. Put a big hand on Roseland’s shoulder. “It was terrible.”

“
Steinfeld,
” the Japanese guy said, sounding exasperated.

Tall for a Japanese, probably a half-breed. Bandage on one ear. Something familiar about his voice.

The guy smiled. A familiar smile.

Roseland stared at him.

Blurting, “You sons of bitches.”

Steinfeld laughed.

“You fuckheads.”

The guerrillas chortled.

“You shit-eating
putzim
!”

Daniel Torrence embraced him.

Roseland didn’t try to stop the tears. He laughed as they rolled down his cheeks. “You motherfucking assholes!”

He stood back, and looked at Torrence. “Who are you supposed to be?”

Torrence grinned. “John Ibishi. Son of a Japanese businessman and an American masseuse. Microcomputer consultant to several French companies.”

Steinfeld put in, “The kind of foreigner the French Fascists leave alone—for the moment—because they need them for the economy.”

Roseland admired the surgical craftsmanship displayed in Torrence’s new face; the epicanthic folds on Torrence’s eyes, the higher cheekbones, the faint tint to the skin. “Badoit hired the best.”

“You guessed it.”

Roseland looked at the other guerrillas. Started to ask where Bibisch was, and didn’t. He could see it in the sag of Torrence’s shoulders, hear it in the strain that went in his banter. Bibisch was dead.

But Torrence was alive. And free from the reprisals.

“Who the hell did they execute?”

“One of their own people,” Torrence said. “A processing-center guard we captured. About my size, close to my looks. We wiped his brain with an extractor, planted a bunch of stuff that seemed to be garbled-up Torrence memories in him. Nothing useful to them. Just tantalizing stuff. Levassier gave him a nasty bash on the head—making it look like he was garbled from brain damage. From a gunshot wound. And whacked off an ear. Planted him where he’d be captured . . . ” He shrugged. “Was an American, too. Some real asshole. Never knew what hit him.”