A Song Called Youth (33 page)

Swenson thought,
I should be happy.
Two more Nazis dead. Killed by their own kind. Steinfeld didn’t even have to waste bullets on them.

But he felt only a kind of gnawing numbness.

He seemed to see the body of a beautiful, copper-skinned young man dead in a ditch, riddled with bullets.

And then he visualized the painting of Saint Sebastian, skewered with arrows . . . 

Oh, no,
he thought.
Oh, God, no. I’ve got an erection.

And the sickness passed.

A fourth guard strolled up, carrying two body bags. “Where will he take them?” Swenson heard himself ask dazedly.

“We have a crackerjack incinerator here,” Watson said. “Just the best.”

“Waste of time, all that speechmaking.” Sackville-West said. He was notorious for his taciturnity.

Watson smiled and said, “Where’s your feelings, Sacks? They had their hearts in the right place, after all. Anyway, I thought our friend Mr. Swenson here could use some clarity on where we stand.”

No one spoke for a few moments. Swenson peered up through the interlacing branches, trying to see the sun. The sky beyond the naked twigs was uniformly steel gray. The woods were silent, except for the strikingly unnatural sound of the body bags being zipped up.

• 14 •

“Hey—how about leaving me a gun?” Rickenharp said. “What the hell. I mean, if I have to stay in this fucking truck alone—this fucking truck I’ve been in all fucking day long. Not to complain or anything.”

Carmen paused, straddling the truck’s closed tail-gate, and looked back at him. She’d just said,
Stay here, don’t move, if anybody speaks to you play dumb. We’re going to see if the pass is open.

Now she was a silhouette, spiky black against the deep indigo of the late evening sky. Even her cold-plumed breath showed in silhouette.

And Rickenharp was sitting with his back to the cold steel, his muscles cramping with the chill of it.

Carmen made a hissing sound of impatience and swung back into the rear of the truck. She crouched by her pack, and he heard the crisp sound of nylon rustling. She took a wedge of darkness from the pack and, moving crabwise, came to hunch beside him.

He felt something cold and heavy pressed into his hands. She was a figure of darkness giving him the means to kill. “It’s a machine pistol,” she said.

Her hands were still on the pistol, and the pistol was in his hands. It was an assassin’s benediction. She was touching him via the pistol.

There was a faint, neat-edged click in the darkness.

The gun glowed in his hands; it shone from within.

The pistol was transparent and electrically lit up. It was framed with stainless steel; the inner sections of the gun were made of glass-clear hyper-compressed plastic. He could see into the magazine, could see the bullets in the clip like a row of robot larvae. A tiny light in the pistol’s butt and another under the breech gave the gun an eerie blue glow.

She ticked a black-painted fingernail against a stud just above the trigger guard. “That’s the safety.
Up
is safety off. After that all you have to do is aim and squeeze the trigger. Those are .22 rounds. Not big, but very precise. The small rounds give you a clip of forty . . . ”

Willow hissed from the tailgate. “Put out that bloody light in there! And come
on
!”

She showed Rickenharp the light switch on the back of the butt and flicked it off. “Light shows up your position—it’s only in case you have to check the gun when you’re under cover. Don’t shoot unless you’re sure someone’s shooting at you, or about to. You might shoot a friend by accident. These plastic guns look like children’s toys. They’re not.” She moved away and slipped out of the truck.

He wanted to ask her,
What made you so sure I didn’t know anything about guns?
But he realized it was a stupid question.

Carefully, holding the gun up so he could see it against the screen of night sky above the tailgate, he took the grip in his hand and slipped his finger into the trigger guard.

He looked at it for a moment; in the darkness it was like an outgrowth of his arm. And a door opened inside him, and something slithered out of the door, leaving a trail of thrill behind it.

Rickenharp drew the gun close to his chest, between both hands, and looked out into the night.

Now and then he had to shrug down farther into his coat, to shake the shivering off. He took deep breaths, trying to stoke oxygen fires in himself, and thought,
Christ! Maybe I’m drugged-out delirious. Maybe I’m still back in Freezone, hallucinating in my shit-hole hotel room. Or maybe I really am somewhere in the Alps with a machine pistol in my hands.

He thought of Ponce and the band. That scene ain’t real, you Grid-nipplers. THIS is real! Gridfriend help me, this is real.

He wiped his nose on his sleeve and listened.

No sound, except the the snap-sound of the wind whipping the canvas. The minutes passed—or maybe they didn’t. He wasn’t sure how long it was before he heard the voices.

Guttural voices. Foreign language.

He thought,
Russians.

Willow had talked about it, blasé as a trucker talking about the highway patrol. “Some of the Alps are Russian and some parts aren’t, and the bloody borders keep shifting. NATO territory today is Russian tomorrow and vice versa, like,” he’d said.

. . . Crunch of footsteps . . . 

I’d have heard gunfire if it was the Russians, he told himself.

But not necessarily. Yukio, Willow, and Carmen might have walked right into a trap—been forced to surrender without firing a shot. Maybe a mile down the road they’re tied up, lying gagged in the back of another truck. Russian truck. Or SAISC—worse. And the SA could be anywhere.

The talking had stopped.
Crunch.
Footsteps again. Closer.

He brought the gun around and rested his elbow on his right knee. He trained the gun on the rear of the truck.

And the Russians torture everybody for intelligence nowadays,
Willow had said. Even sheep farmers.

He reached across the top of the gun and flicked off the safety.

The guttural voice again. He tried to be sure of the language. Couldn’t hear it clearly enough.

A creak as someone stepped onto the rear bumper, two shapes blurred together in the rear, the guttural voice again, and then the rear of the truck lit up—

It lit up with strobe flashes, four of them, going off like flashbulbs, making the scene at the rear of the truck into a choppy motion-picture sequence: Carmen, hand lifted over her eyes, mouth opened to shout, a strange man beside her in a watch cap, his eyes wide; Carmen with two red holes in her chest; Carmen with arm flung up; Carmen falling back.

The back of the truck echoed, a metallic lisp for each gunshot.

And Rickenharp realized he’d squeezed the trigger.

He thought, Willow said something yesterday about meeting some Swiss friends.

And then: I shot Carmen.

“The truth is,” Molt was saying, “there are two factions in administration. One faction is basically in favor of martial law in the Colony. Their attitude is something like, the danger to the station’s life-support system is too great if they let things go on.”

Bonham sat in the After, listening to Molt talk on an old twelve-inch TV sunk flush with the wall, thinking,
Molt sounds tired, mechanical. Barely maintaining.

And the TV in Prego’s After was tired itself, barely maintaining, the talking-head image of Molt warping into the outline of a peanut shell, making Molt look even more tired.

Bonham nestled back in the easy chair. The chair took up half the room. Like everything else in the small room, the chair was frayed, ripping out at the seams, and grimy. The walls were papered with fading printout porn; marker graffiti overlapped unreadably on the walls between the printout girls. There was a mattress behind the easy chair stained with a revolting potpourri of effluvia. This end of the Colony had some kind of heat-convection problem and Prego had been issued a space heater to compensate; the heat rose and its waves lifted the papery girls by the corners of their pages; the heat had activated the decay factor built into the paper, so that the underprinting was showing through: T
IME TO RECYCLE ME.
There was a heap of Prego’s laundry beside the TV set; its sourness dominated the room.

There were three rooms in Prego’s After; the other two malodorous, trashed-up rooms were bigger, crowded with people drinking Prego’s foul home brew;
fermented garbage,
Molt called it. Bonham had the door closed and the TV turned up as loud as it would go, to beat the sounds coming from the other rooms: laughter, minimono blaring; he had to strain to hear as Molt, on TV, went on, “ . . . The other faction is . . . I believe . . . sincerely interested in negotiating a compromise with strikers. The blockade state of emergency is a time when we should all be working together to survive . . . ” He paused to glance at his notes. Bonham saw that Molt’s hands were shaking and he blinked too often.

Molt was replaced by Asheem Spengle; the technicki commentator’s triple-Mohawk was comically warped by the distortion in the upper half of the screen so that he looked like a tropical bird. He said something in technicki, which was translated at the bottom of the screen in subtitles. “ . . . And that was our excerpt from Radleader Molt’s media conference, which he gave yesterday after his release from Colony Detention . . . We noticed that more than once Radleader Molt referred to a written text in giving his statement. We cannot help but wonder who wrote that text. Was it indeed Radleader Molt? Or was it written for him by Colony Admin? Molt’s statement was followed by an endorsement from the Colony’s own founder, Professor Rimpler, and his daughter Claire . . . Clearly Molt’s involvement with these two high administration figures sheds doubt on the sincerity of his—”

Bonham changed the channel, muttering, “Bullshit.”

Another news show, this one in Standard English delicately articulated by an anchorwoman who looked like she was from the Middle East: “ . . . have renewed their demands on a document teletyped to Admin officials today; the council of radleaders demanded a timetable for technicki integration into Admin housing projects in the Open, technicki representation in all Admin governing committees, guarantees of improved living conditions, and removal of SAISC ‘conflict prevention guards’ from technicki gathering places and hallways . . . ” Bonham leaned forward, seeing himself on the screen, a slightly wobbly image, a burst of static fuzzing the anchorwoman’s words. He caught, “ . . . Bonham, chairman of the Radleader council, speaking today . . . ”

Then he heard his own voice and hated the sound of it over TV. It sounded bloodless, too high-pitched. And Prego’s damn screen was warping his image, making his head quiver like a soap bubble. He heard himself say, “ . . . amazed they think we can be manipulated with double-talk out of George Orwell like ‘conflict prevention guards.’ Storm troopers are storm troopers.”

Bonham shrugged. It was okay. Sometimes they used a slice that made you sound a fool. But that one went right to the point.

The anchorwoman was going on to something not directly related to Bonham, and Bonham began to lose interest. “ . . . Full power was restored to the top four sublevels today by Admin technicians, despite technicki striker efforts to sabotage the conduits to—”

“ ‘Con-dew-its,’ ” Bonham said. “Nobody uses that word anymore. But I like the shape your lips make when you use it.”

He kicked the switch with the toe of his rubber cowboy boot and sadly watched the lovely brown-eyed face compact and vanish into itself.

He looked at his watch, and thought,
I’m late, just about the right amount.

Bonham got up, stretched, and picked his way through the room, through the door to the next, larger room crowded with partiers, thudding with minimono; he moved deftly through the tangle of legs, avoiding the ones who deliberately tried to trip him; he blinked against the thick smoke, thinking the smoke seemed to be moving to the music (but that couldn’t be possible, could it?), and found the door.

The After was illegal, and Admin was beginning to crack down on places like it, correctly figuring them to be hotbeds of radical fermentation. So he paused at the monitor screens, checked the hall for bulls, swiveling Prego’s camouflaged TV camera both ways. All clear.

Bonham opened the door, stepped through, closed it quickly behind him. Rubbing his eyes, he hurried down the corridor to the nearest crossover.

He passed a gaggle of technickids graffiting the corridor wall; they froze when he turned the corner, looking over their shoulders at him. He smiled and shrugged, and they grinned, relaxing. There were four of them, all about eleven years old, and they were in four colors: Hispanic derivation, black, Caucasian, and one that was maybe southeast Asian. Their jumpsuits were tricked out with buttons and patches—their parents’ tech rating patches, next to minimono wiredancers looking dolefully out from glossy buttons, as unreal as the buttons showing cartoon characters.

The corridor here was riotous with graffiti, almost black with it in places; the sloganeering that had begun it was clotted over with obscenities and identities and gang symbols. There was more gang graffiti lately, and he wondered if it was time to take the techni-kid gangs seriously as a threat.

The door into the crossover for the Open had been vandalized off its hinges. Halfway down the crossover, an SAISC guard blocked the way. Maybe the guard was that far back from the door because the ones who stood right in the doorways were just begging for a lob. Bonham had once lobbed a Molotov himself, and then thought,
Am I crazy? If this place burns down there’s nowhere to run to.

Could the Colony burn? Some said yes, some said no, some said portions of it could, and there might be flammable insulation in the walls, and if flammable wire burned back to that flammable insulation, the place could fill with smoke, and even though there were theoretically enough gas masks and shelter-suits to go around, word was about a third of them had been vandalized or decayed past use . . . Bonham occupied his mind that way, trying to throw off the jitters and only making it worse as he walked up to the armoured guard.