A Song Called Youth (30 page)

The Colony was something maternal to her, and now, beyond all reason, the Colony was hurting its children.

A sudden, cruel pain in Claire’s right shoulder and she looked around to see the blank beetle-wing face distorting her reflection. The pain was his hand clamped on her. She pictured an insect claw clamping her shoulder, and she bit off a scream; and then the helmeted head tilted up to look past her, and magically, the carapace cracked down the middle.

Angie had come.

Angie followed up with a karate kick. The man staggered back, letting go of Claire’s arm. The other women closed in as the second and third of the helmeted guards stepped out the door, electric stun batons swinging.

Judy pushed Claire out of the way; Claire fell back, and as she fell she saw something strange: Judy and Kris slapping the back of the beetle helmets. It seemed strangely like the sort of helpless-female gesture they abhorred, that slapping motion—and then Claire fell onto the floor. She lay still for a moment, trying to get her breath, then sat up and stared: the bulls were slapping at themselves, were screaming, writhing on their hands and knees, trying to claw their helmets off. Judy and Kris had—with what resembled ladylike slaps—attached high-frequency warblers to the helmets. Pain-inducing sound waves reverberated inside the helmets.

Then Judy and Angie and Kris stood around the fallen men and worked them over with nunchuks, whipping the chained clubs to strike in the unprotected places between the armored segments built into their flat-black uniforms. In their fencing masks and chest protectors, pounding mechanically with the nunchuks, the women looked as inhuman as the Security bulls . . . 

Claire yelled, “Stop it stop it stop it!”

Then Angie was looking down at her, through the fly’s-eye grid of the fencing mask. “What was it you said about using your ‘sheer authority’?” she said.

Judy said, “Shut up, Angie.” She helped Claire to her feet, and Claire made herself go in to help them take Molt off the bed. She didn’t look at the unconscious men on the floor.

When they stepped into the room, Molt saw them and screamed, clawing at his straps, trying to get away from them.

• 13 •

It would be a real mistake to underestimate Ellen Mae Crandall, Swenson told himself, as he watched her talking to the Los Angeles SA recruiting staff on satvid. She likes to play shrinking violet, take-me-in-your-strong-hands, but for her it just might be a game, almost as vicarious as reading a romance novel. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe when she changes, when she gets soft and pliable, she means it.

Maybe she’s both people.

“Just make absolutely completely sure there’s a clear division of intel awareness between the first two levels and the third. Need-to-know is the axis of the organization,” she told the man on the screen.

Swenson, sitting hunched over the report spread out on the long wooden table, looked up again at the stainless-steel cross on the antique cabinet across the room. His eyes were drawn to it, again and again, and he knew that was dangerous.

It’ll suck me right out of character, he thought. I could become Father Stisky.

He’d half expected to find swastikas on the walls at Cloudy Peak Farm. Portraits of Hitler. Something. But there was only the small German “iron cross” insignia, hardly noticeable, engraved into the intersection of the three-foot Christian Cross on its maplewood stand.

The long, narrow, book-lined room was log-cabin styled; halflogs on the inside and outside concealed the wall’s electrical and electronic guts. There were tinted-glass Tiffany lampshades over the imitation gaslamps curving from the walls. An enormous flagstone fireplace hulked at one end. Swenson had looked twice to be sure the logs burning in the fireplace were real. In the acid-rain states it was illegal to cut trees for firewood. There just weren’t enough trees left for that luxury.

The house wore its wood the way status-conscious socialites had once worn their minks. It had been “made out of the wood of the trees they found growing right here on the land, the way my brother wanted it,” Ellen Mae had told him. “He likes things natural and simple, the way God likes them. God gave us dominion over all things of this world.”

That’s his problem, Swenson thought. He confuses what he likes with what God likes, all the way down the line.

And then he chided himself for falling out of character.
Don’t even think things like that.

She was standing over him now, and he looked up into her face—a face that looked craggier than ever in the uneven light, and he felt a purl of despair.
I not only have to make love to this woman, I have to do it well. I have to make her want more.

“How’s it look?” she said.

He stammered a moment, then realized she meant the report. “Um—I think it’s just about ready.”

Ellen Mae placed a hand on the table close to his left elbow and bent over him to look at the report, her arm around him like a schoolteacher looking at the work of a favorite child; his skin crackled with the slight furriness of her cheek. He felt a wave of revulsion—followed quickly by arousal, and he wondered where
that
was coming from.

“It looks fine,” she said, scanning, flipping through it. Probably not really looking at all. Her breath smelled like iron.

She straightened and put her hands on his shoulders. “Let’s visit Rick and we can give him this.”

Oh, shit,
he thought.

But aloud he said: “Great!” Sprightly as he could make it. He shuffled the papers together, put them in a folder, and added, “But maybe he’ll want to see this as a readout. I could put the corrections on a datastick—”

“He wants it tonight if he can get it,” she said. She sighed. “He shouldn’t be working at night—he shouldn’t be working at all—but just try to keep him from it.”

Ellen Mae said it reverently.

It was like finding a secret passage that led from a home into a hospital.

They turned a corner, and the wooden hallways ended. Abruptly, they were in a long white hall: white tile floors, white walls; shiny pieces of medical apparatus on steel tables equipped with rollers, looking malevolently arcane, waited to be wheeled in to Crandall’s room if the doctors needed it. There were three doctors here, specialists who were staying on at Cloudy Peak while Crandall was convalescing.

Were the doctors in the SA? Swenson wondered. They must be, for security reasons. Swenson reflected on the surprising number of educated men in the SA. Even intellectuals. But then, the driving force of the neofascist French New Right were its intellectuals. It was an old paradox: a powerful mind was no proof against stupidity. Ideas rooted in brutality had an emotional origin. Emotion could make any notion seem reasonable.
Stay in character, even in your mind.

There was an SAISC guard standing in the doorway, his face hidden in a dark green-blue helmet. He stood with his legs braced apart, one gloved hand clasped over his wrist. He was like a living gun.

But he stepped aside, seeing Ellen Mae. She didn’t even glance at him; it was as if he were a wall fixture.

And then Swenson followed her through, and there was Crandall, in bed, smiling up at them.

Swenson smiled back. But he couldn’t look Crandall in the eye. So he looked around the room. On the tables beside the bed were framed pictures, some of Ellen Mae alone, one of Ellen Mae and their parents, who were said to be living on a ranch somewhere in New Mexico. In the picture Ellen Mae and her parents were sitting together on the bench of a picnic table. Ellen Mae looked like her father.

And she looked like Crandall. And Crandall had a lean, wolfish face that might have belonged to a backwoods imbecile—except for the personality shining through it, transforming it in some subtle way. The personality, the benevolence on a foundation of sheer self-certainty, made that inbred country face something magnetic.

Crandall had never been married. He said he was married to his mission. But in total there were four pictures of Ellen Mae, and Swenson wondered if there was some kind of repressed undercurrent of incest between Ellen Mae and Smiling Rick Crandall.

A bank of instruments clicked and peeped on the wall behind Crandall. From one of them a tube had extruded to sink its single silvery fang into a vein in Crandall’s left forearm.

The room was decorated in soft white; the cabinets across from the bed were topped by pots holding a small forest of cream colored flowers. Swenson pictured the SA bomb detection team going through each vase and afterward meticulously putting the flowers back the way they’d been, and he almost laughed aloud.

He became aware of the tension knotting his chest then; he could see his own impending hysteria like the foreshortened horizon of a cliff’s edge in the distance.

He fought it by sinking roots into the character, into Swenson.

Here’s the trick, Purchase had told him. You have to be like a perfectly camouflaged bug in a fone. If it’s made right, the antibugging team could take the fone apart and not find the bug. You’ve got to operate like a fone, buzz like a fone, do everything that a fone does, just exactly, and not transmit until it’s time to transmit and then do it without breaching the illusion you’re just a fone. You’ve got to think you’re an ordinary “fone” until that moment.

But still, he thought, I could grab the guard’s gun, I could kill them both right here. Sacrifice myself. Get it over with.

Only that wouldn’t stop the SA. There was still Watson, and the others.

So he looked at Crandall and told himself,
This man’s a hero. This man’s a martyr. This man is here on a Holy Mission for God. This man is here to purify the world.

And looking at Crandall, you could believe it. Even when he sat up, and they could see the bandages swathing his bony chest, and he muttered as he fumbled with the TV control unit to make the thin, filmy screen unreel from the ceiling.

“Something coming on TV, I want ya’ll to see it,” he said.

The viddy membrane dominated its part of the room. It held a perfect 3D image of a submarine surfacing, the water parting for the vessel like lace-edged stage-curtains.

“ . . . As the art of making the ocean ‘transparent’ has improved,” the commentator said, “techniques for making Russian submarines quieter improved almost simultaneously. This Russian ‘bottom-crawler,’ when in its cruising mode and not using its treads to crawl on the bottom, is outfitted with a new sound-damping device which absorbs the noise of its nuclear reactor’s noisy cooling equipment, making it virtually impossible to detect with the sound surveillance system of hydrophones the Navy has planted along North America’s continental shelf. Russian teams of saboteurs comb the shelves in bottomcrawlers, destroying fiberoptic sensor cables where they find them, further reducing our ability to detect enemy subs. The NSA has reported that the Russian ability to detect our submarines is enhanced by a new system of ocean-bed-implanted computers which monitor seabed vibrations and search for turbulence-vibrations typical of submarines. These developments threaten the delicate balance of deterrence that prevents the use of strategic nuclear weapons in the Russian-NATO war. If the Russians can detect American submarines carrying nuclear weapons, they could eliminate them, making a Russian first strike more practical.”

Crandall switched off the sound. Images of deep-sea military juggernauts hunched silently across the screen. “Now, of course,” Crandall drawled, “Mrs. Anna Bester might just be angling for more military funding, releasing this stuff. I had my misgivings about a woman president, but by gosh, the woman is no weak bleeding heart . . . But if this new threat to American subs is on the level, the SAISC might just have what they used to call a ‘window of opportunity.’ Our clandestine surveillance department has come up with something new we just might be able to trade to the Department of Defense for a little unbending on Our Work in Europe. If they gave us better logistical support, we’d have the European situation sewn up.”

My God,
Swenson thought. It hit Swenson like a blow to the stomach.
They’re moving into everything.

“The DoD has shown some interest in the new thing from Armaments,” Ellen Mae said. “They’d like to see the Jægernaut field-tested . . . ”

Crandall glanced at Swenson—and Swenson felt a chill.

“I think it’s best we hold off on talking about that, Ellen Mae honey.” Crandall said.

Because I haven’t got a top-level SA Security clearance, Swenson thought.

Or is it more? Do they suspect me?

Purchase’s people had gone to elaborate lengths to build up an identity for John Swenson: Birth certificate and baby pictures planted in a small Midwestern town; elaborate schemes to obtain letters of recommendation from SA members and supporters who were led to believe they knew Swenson when they didn’t: Purchase had access to Worldtalk’s memory-tampering systems. He fed false experiences into the men who were to give the recommendations; they seemed to remember Swenson’s assistance, Swenson’s right-wing politics, Swenson’s sacrifices and invaluable advice.

Sackville-West had six hours of video interviews with SA sympathizers who “remembered” Swenson. And all the documentation was there.

But maybe Crandall smelled a ringer.

There’d been just the faintest flare of suspicion in Crandall’s eyes, somehow not at all incongruous with the smile, when he’d shaken Swenson’s hand.

Was it suspicion . . . Or jealousy? Swenson wondered. Crandall would know that Swenson and Ellen Mae were on the verge of becoming an item.

Suddenly Swenson was uncomfortably aware of the armed guard standing behind them, quiet as a piece of furniture, lethal as a bullet.

Crandall changed the subject, and Swenson forced himself to listen to Crandall’s diatribe on a threatened liberalization of the ironically-named Antiviolence Laws of 2025.

“ . . . The principle is very simple, as I see it, John,” Crandall was saying. “And since it was voted into law, violent crime has been reduced in the country. I don’t know the precise statistics . . . ” He looked at Swenson.