A Song Called Youth (29 page)

She looked at him in shock. “What?”

“You heard me. Yes, the technickis are in fact being discriminated against, to some degree. I’ll tell you something else, Claire my dear—Praeger and his people have seen to it that blacks, Jews, and Muslims are no longer being advanced in Admin! Oh, yes! I know for a fact that he plans to weed them out under one pretense or another, when the blockade is lifted. There’s discrimination for you. But we don’t
dare
point it out—if Praeger falls, we fall. Things are at that kind of boiling point.” His voice dropped from brisk to weary, cynical, marking his shift in mood. He poured himself a tequila, mixed in lime juice and grenadine, then drank off half of it and stared dully into space. “The Ozymandias principle,” he said, mostly to himself. “The bigger the enterprise, the more ridiculous you look when you see it was all for nothing, when entropy makes a joke of it.”

Claire stood, and moved to sit beside her father; but he only hunched even more. He wore white shorts beginning to yellow; a button-up shirt opened to show the steel-wool hair of his chest; on his feet were decaying thongs. He smelled sour. His eyes focused only on his drink. He held the glass up to the light; the beaded crystal was transfixed by a beam of emerald.

She put an arm over his shoulders; they felt thin and bony. He shrank from her touch, and she dropped her arm. She spoke in a parody of a teacher’s recitation: “Dad—if a small meteor impacts the Colony’s outer skin, the break is sealed up with the Rimpler alloy. All through the hull is a layer of Rimper Alloy. If the alloy is kept at ninety-two degrees, it’s liquid; if the cold of space breaks in, it freezes instantly, fills the hole, restores airtight integrity . . . I make that little speech to the kids when I take them out to the hull observation station. Professor Rimpler made that alloy, I tell them, and he designed this home in space, and he’s always trying to make it better for them. There’s no alloy that reseals things if we break up in a civil war, Dad. We have to seal the civil breach. And it’s you people expect to do it. You have to go on viddy and talk to them. You have to patch up the holes for them.”

He pressed the cold glass to his forehead. Tonelessly he said, “If you can get Molt to help us, then maybe. But don’t count on any help from him. They went down to interrogate him an hour ago . . . ”

Claire stood and backed away from him. She looked at him hard, trying to recognize him. “Dad—how do you know these things? Praeger’s ‘racial weeding’ . . . their plans for Molt . . . ?”

He gestured vaguely toward his console. “When I designed the comm system I . . . built a few safeguards into it. I can monitor Praeger’s instructions. I get them all routed to me automatically; I have his code, too.” He shrugged. “If you get Molt, I’ll talk to the technickis. But just for you. Not because I care about them. They’re a lot of
E. coli
in the belly of the beast.”

She stared at him. And thought:
Let it go.
If that was his attitude about them, it was something that she couldn’t change. Not now.

Claire turned and spoke to the door panel; it slid aside and she walked down the hall to her apartment, where she changed into her Admin Governing Committee jumpsuit, thinking:
E. Coli in the belly of the beast?
There was something pathological about putting it that way.

She pinned her Security pass to her collar, needing the semblance of authority. She took her father’s private lift three levels toward Admin. Security level was the entire floor below Admin—like a moat around a castle. As the lift stopped, a panel over the door lit up red with the words S
ECURITY—
P
ASSES
O
NLY.

Her palms were damp. She wiped them on her hips and told herself, “You are in charge.”

The door opened and Claire stepped into the hallway. A camera looked at her. She held up her pass for the camera to see. Nothing stopped her as she walked down the hall.

She hesitated at the glass doors. Someone had stenciled
Happy Holidays
and a cluster of holly leaves on the glass, and she remembered that it was near Christmas. They would put the big artificial tree up in the Open soon. But no, not with all the vandalism that had been happening. The technicki vandals would make a wreck of it.

She went through the door. A young man smiled up at her from behind the glassy desk. Four small TV monitors to his right showed all four access corridors to Security. There was no need for him to watch them, really; the computers did it quite efficiently alone. But where possible her father had arranged for a human being to oversee cybernetic functions; the other engineers had hinted that the human backup arrangement was irrational, even eccentric.

The young man in the flat-black SAISC uniform kept smiling as he said, “How can I help you, Ms. Rimpler?” His face was pretty, almost angelic, but his hand lay on the desk within reach of the summons button. She and her father had been in Denver for a UNIC meeting when Praeger had revamped Security. They’d come back and found Second Alliance International Security Corporation men setting up new surveillance gear and sentry teams strategically throughout the Colony; the grim, gray-black uniforms could be glimpsed wherever the corridors made a nexus . . . 

The SAISC struck her as altogether too secretive an outfit, almost cultish. There was, after all, its connection to Crandall, who was close to being a cult leader.

“I need four men to escort a prisoner from lockup,” she said, trying to sound assertive. “Samson Molt.”

The receptionist’s smile froze right where it was.

“Let me see what I can do—” He turned to the terminal, tapped a fone number; a face appeared on the screen. She couldn’t see it clearly from this angle, but she thought it was Scanlon’s. The receptionist was going to the top, which seemed out of sequence. “Ms. Rimpler is here, asking permission to see a prisoner, Samson Molt . . . ”

“To escort him out of there,” Claire broke in. “I want to take responsibility for him. He is to be remanded to my custody. I need a few men to help me—”

Scanlon’s voice, like his digitally compressed face, was too flat, too oblique.

“The situation is dangerously unstable, Claire. Molt’s release would contradict the public information we’ve already given out; we’ve had to say repeatedly that we don’t know where he is.”

“No one believes that anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Claire, but if you’d like to put in a formal request for his transfer, we will process it and try to give you an answer within two or three weeks.”

“This is ridiculous, Scanlon. I want to talk to you face to face.” But the screen went blank. “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said blandly, the smile now completely gone. “He’s out doing fieldwork. If you’d like to make an . . . ”

Claire turned and walked out; it was as if she were swept along by something, washed into the elevators, and not until she’d gone down to Central Telecast and found Judy in the commissary did she really take note of her surroundings.

Claire looked around the commissary, blinking, and then sighed and sank into the cracked blue plastic seat across from Judy Avickian. Judy was small, eyes nearly black, waist-length curly black hair braided for work, looped over one shoulder to dangle in front of her white and gold skin-suit. Judy liked things white and gold; her earrings were ivory on gold wires. There was a suggestion of a mustache just above the corners of her pale lips, but it wasn’t much more than a shadow, and she was an attractive woman; attractive and strong. She and Claire had had a brief fling, and then Claire had shrugged and said, “I guess I’m just heterosexual.” Now they were friends, but when certain subjects floated by on the conversational stream, Judy’s tone became acrid.

The room was too well lit, as cafeterias have always been; the vending machines built into the walls hummed, but behind the glass, the shrink-wrapped, vitamin-injected food in the little slots looked, in that harsh light, like wax imitations.

“You look pissed off,” Judy observed.

“You know it.” Claire told her what had happened at Security Central. “Two years ago it would’ve been unheard of. Those people worked for my father—for the Colony. Now they’ve . . . ”

Judy nodded slowly, her eyes gazing at something inward. “The SAISC are invited in where there’s a power vacuum. Where somebody in collaboration with them plans to fill the vacuum.” She looked at Claire. “I was talking to a woman, the mother of a kid they arrested. She hasn’t seen the kid in a month. They won’t grant her visitor’s privileges. She thinks something’s wrong, She thinks they hurt him. Maybe he’s dead. They hit him three times with an RR stick. He was thirteen years old.”

“What’s an RR stick?”

“Recoil reversal. The recoil you’d normally feel when you hit something, the kinetic energy, is rerouted back into the point of impact a split-second later—it’s like the stick hits you twice when they hit you with it only once. The guy using it can’t judge how much force he’s used . . . ”

“Jesus. When did you see her?”

“Two days ago. We’ve been gathering material for a story on it, but I’m not sure they’ll give us permission—” She shrugged. “The bottom line, Claire, is that UNIC is taking it all away from your father.”

Claire blinked and said, “I don’t think it’s quite that, uh . . . ”

Judy shrugged and shook her head at the same time. “You want to get in to see Molt?”

Claire nodded.

“And you want my help?”

Claire nodded again, watching Judy. The bitterness was there. Judy’s tone said,
I tried to warn you about this before. You should have trusted me, listened to me. Stayed with me.

Judy stood up. “Then let’s go get my class.”

There were four of them, Judy, Angie, Belle, and Kris. Belle and Kris were sisters, both of them tall and black. Angie was Swedish, blond and blue-eyed, her expression always fierce; she was a bulky, high-breasted, big-boned woman, and she wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of the last century’s National Socialist paintings of Aryan peasants. But Angie, Judy’s instructor, was fervently Neo-Marxist.

They were Admin, and educated in standard English. But they were strongly sympathetic to the technicki cause.

They wore black exercise leotards, fencing masks, corrugated chest protectors. They looked like umpires for a woman’s baseball team, Claire thought. Only, Angie and Judy carried nunchuks.

Angie had always looked at Claire with a kind of your-time-will-come disdain; she took off her mask just to let Claire see that expression now as Claire took charge.

“I’m going in first,” Claire said. “I’ll leave the door unlocked. When you hear me shout, come running.”

Judy shook her head vehemently. “I think we’d better go in with you now.”

“I don’t want to provoke them. It’ll be better if I can get Molt on sheer authority. If I can’t, you’ll hear from me.” She tapped the comm button on her collar.

Feeling a little dizzy, she turned to the door.

This is rarefied air for me, she thought. Goddammit, Dad, if you were here . . . 

She took the code key from her pocket, looked at the coordination indicator: Level 03, Corridor C13. She was near the outer shell. She could feel it—the gravity was faintly greater near the outside of the Colony.

The codekey looked like a small handgun with a crystal muzzle; she turned the two dials at the back of the key to read 03 and C13; then she pressed the codekey to the lock panel and the door opened.

She expected to see a guard on the other side, but there was no one. A sheet of transparent plastic wall blocked her way, forty feet farther on. But she knew what it was, one of her father’s security precautions, and she’d come prepared.

She dialed the codekey, and pressed it to the bulkhead. A small red arrow lit up on the bottom dial, pointing upward. She kept the key pressed to the wall, and moved the key upward; it chimed. The codekey communicated with the regulator on the other side of the bulkhead, and the plastic wall slid up.

She walked on, heart pounding, feeling like a burglar.

A door was open on the right. From inside it came a single drawn-out note, and after a moment she recognized it as sound made by a human throat: a high, fluting note, curling from fear to despair—and abruptly cutting off.

And then a voice, someone else’s voice: “The simple thing would have been to get a neurohumoral extractor up here, take it all right out.”

“Scanlon had a requisition in for one, Doc.” Another voice.

“But you can’t get anything through the blockade, and they’re hard to get anyway. Illegal as hell. Problem with customs.”

“Is it illegal now? I’ve been up here too long—I didn’t know.”

Claire made herself walk up to the open door and look in.

There were three of them who were
like that.
Faceless in helmets. And the horror of their faceless heads was tripled: one would have unsettled her, but three splintered her will. The helmets they wore, blanking out their faces with opaque blue-green visors, looked like things made of beetle wings. They were NA “security bulls.” And she thought, security
bulls
is wrong: they’re like insects, insects big as men.

They were bent over the man strapped to the bed.
Molt.
She saw what they’d done to him. She bit her lip. To one side, a white haired, white-coated doctor looked faintly querulous as he glanced up at her from his instruments. Like something startled from feeding.

Claire stepped back, turned, pressed herself against the corridor wall, beside the door, and stopped thinking. She shouted into her comm button. She heard footsteps inside the cell, and a helmet-muted voice saying, “I don’t know but we’re sure as hell gonna find out who she is.”

Claire was remembering a time as a little girl when she’d walked in on her parents and her dad had been all tied up in thin white ropes and her mother was standing over him with a whip and Daddy’s face was all welted and, not understanding the sexual game, she’d thought,
If Mommy could do that to Daddy, she could hurt me, too.
It had turned her world view upside down. And she felt the same way now.