A Song Called Youth (39 page)

Out.

“I can’t go the way they want me to.” Bonham was saying. “I had a warning from someone on their side—The SA’s going to take me if I go back their way, for brainwashing. Hardcore extraction and conditioning. If we go back my way, we can use the NR for an escape route.”

“What’s the NR?”

“New Resistance. Antifascists.”

She snorted. “Do they know who you sold out to?”

His face went blotchy red. “I—it was because the place is doomed. It’s going to die. You and I know it. So I do what I have to, to get off.”

Off.

“Is there . . . a bargain we have to make?”

“An understanding.”

“Okay,” she said, hating herself for the first time in her life. Down.

After a moment she added, softly, “I do want to go.”

To Earth.

• 17 •

The message was for Watson, but Ellen Mae was the only one in the room when it came in at Cloudy Peak Farm. The main console was in the living room, its screens looking alien in their glossiness against all that wood under the deer antlers and the badger pelt. She was walking through on her way to the kitchen to make the bread, her mind sorting details for the upcoming Service, and the console lit up just as if her passing by had wakened it.

She glanced over the message, saw it was coded. No one else here so she used the password. The console scanned her retina, then gave her the message. It was for Watson, and she almost lost interest and then her eye caught a name—
Swenson.

She read it all carefully then.

It was from Purchase. Requesting the presence of John Swenson at the Worldtalk Building in New York. Some executive there had met Swenson, had taken a liking to him, wanted to make him permanent liaison between the SAISC and Worldtalk, this meeting very important to facilitate smooth acquisition of Worldtalk, urgent that Swenson come to New York immediately . . . 

Nonsense, she thought. Worldtalk was already as good as acquired. Purchase was kowtowing to his Worldtalk boss, that was all. Forgetting who he answered to, really answered to.

Ellen Mae deleted the message. The hair rose on the back of her neck as she did it. This was against procedure. Rick wouldn’t approve. Watson wouldn’t approve. Sackville-West would positively glower.

But she didn’t hesitate. She sent Purchase a message:
John Swenson has more important work to do, right here. Don’t contact us again unless it’s really urgent.

And she signed it
Crandall.

Well after all, she was a Crandall, wasn’t she?

Feeling deliciously mischievous, she went to make bread dough, smiling as she thought,
I did that just like the lady spies in the old movies.

Swenson was sitting alone in the chapel. Outside, the snow fell in bleached-white flurries. The snowfall rippled the light, making the stained-glass figures seem to quiver as if they were about to move.

It was chilly in there; he had his hands tucked in his armpits. He was looking at the figures in stained glass. After looking a long time, he’d decided that one of them was definitely Charles Darwin. Another was Gregor Johann Mendel. How did Crandall square this with Christian Fundamentalism? With creationism? He didn’t try. The “Christianity” Crandall showed the public was not the strange faith he practiced in private.

The pseudo-Christianity of the Second Circle was almost crypto-druidic. Its imagery was pastoral. Its interpretation of genetics was almost fertility worship. Its intellectual content owed something to the Sociobiologists, even more to Nietzsche and Bergson and Heisenberg. It had its own mythology. Its own vision of the future.

The Second Circle’s vision of the future came into the chapel, with Watson.

It was a boy.

Watson was wearing a heavy wool overcoat. There were snowflakes melting on his shoulders. The boy wore a gray-black SA uniform, charmingly miniaturized, down to the overcoat and the black gloves. A black watch cap was half tucked into Watson’s coat pocket. The boy held his own black-billed cap in his hands. They stood at the beginning of the aisle, between the first set of pews, a few yards to Swenson’s right. They looked around, Watson looking at the chapel as if he’d never seen it before. He stood behind the boy, one weather-reddened hand on the boy’s shoulder.

In college, John Stisky had written a paper on Fascist Ideology. Looking at the boy with Watson now, he remembered a line from the English fascist James Barnes:
The present
Weltanschauung
of fascism may be summed up in one word—youth.

He was a little surprised to see the boy had brown hair. He’d expected blond. But then, Crandall’s vision of the earth-born purity of American fascism was rooted in the American countryside, especially the West. Crandall collected Frederic Remington originals. Cowboys were most often depicted as having brown hair.

But blue eyes, oh, yes, and his features were from another of Crandall’s collections: His Norman Rockwells. The painting of a bright, tolerant, curious young WASP boy scout.

“That’s Darwin, isn’t it?” the boy asked, looking at the stained glass.

Watson smiled. “Very good.”

But Watson’s smile was replaced with a mild frown of concern as he turned to look at Swenson.

“You’re not feeling well this morning, John?”

“I’m all right, thanks. Just thoughtful. Distracted. There’s . . . so much to do.”

“I know how you feel,” said Watson and went on, perfectly serious: “It staggers the mind, the job we have ahead of us. The shaping of a world!”

Swenson realized that Watson was talking portentously for the boy’s sake. “I assume our friend here is . . . ?”

“This is the lad,” Watson said proudly. “Jebediah Andrew Jackson Smith.”

The boy looked humbly down.

“Our new junior deacon!” Swenson said, kindly. “Welcome.”

And as he said it he thought,
Maybe this is the one I should kill.

Jebediah Smith was Crandall’s great experiment. “The proof of the pudding,” Crandall had said. “And the cream of the crop.”

Jebediah was one of a group of ten-year-old boys and girls raised in Colton City, the SAISC’s “ideal town.” Swenson had never been there. He’d only recently acquired the security clearance that made it possible. He’d seen pictures. It looked like the Hometown USA section of Disney City. Except, in the background, you could see the guard towers. Colton City was in a “low-fallout probability” area, in northwestern California. It was highly protected, insular, and permitted no tourist traffic. Its town motto was “Colton City: Beautiful, Comfortable, Safe, and Christian.” Jeb and twelve others had been raised in the town’s Christian Fellowship Center. Jebediah was supposed to be “deeply and resolutely imbued with our principles.”

“I feel a Power in this place,” the boy said, with complete assurance. He walked up the aisle, alone, unafraid, and stepped up to stand beside the altar. He put a hand on the altar and looked around. “I feel a Power here,” he repeated. “I feel this place is chosen as the place for a new beginning. A new creation.”

Holy shit,
Swenson, the former priest, thought to himself.

Because there was nothing like a false note in the kid’s voice, nothing histrionic or rehearsed. The boy was speaking out of his depths.

God help him,
Swenson thought. What had they done to him?

Watson said, “You just look around to your heart’s content, son.” There was a touch of awe in Watson’s voice now. He looked shaken.

He sat down beside Swenson, said softly, “The boy still amazes me.”

Swenson nodded.

Watson looked at him. “Want to tell me about it, John? I mean—what’s troubling you?”

Swenson wanted to. He wanted to tell him what was really bothering him: Sackville-West was going to put some of them under extractors, and John Swenson would be one of those extracted, and they would ask him about himself, and find out his history was false, and ask him about his real one, and they’d hear all about the NR, and Steinfeld, and Purchase. And there would be a bloodbath along with his own execution.
And so you see, Watson,
Swenson would say,
I was just sitting here wondering if I should try to borrow a car, maybe make up a reason to drive into town, get past the gates, run and hide. Only, Watson, I have a feeling they won’t let me leave till after the information extraction.

But that was not the worst of it. Not for Swenson. The worse part was, he was beginning to feel like he belonged here, in this chapel. Like he
should
tell them everything.

He watched the boy Jebediah, who was staring up at the oil painting of Crandall sitting with Jesus, the boy maybe wondering where he would fit into the painting. A boy with a sense of destiny . . . 

“You don’t want to talk about it, John?” Watson went on. There was no suspicion in his voice.

But Swenson knew he had to respond, and quickly. Watson sensed he was gnawed at by something. They all knew about him and Ellen Mae, of course. All the more reason he must be monitored very closely. He had to give Watson something . . . 

Swenson sighed. “Perhaps I
do
need to talk to someone about it . . . I guess I worry that we might be betraying young Jebediah here, and all the other young ones. We might be moving into this thing too fast. Biting off more than we can chew. It’s
the war
that worries me. We’re deploying thousands of troops in a war zone and the risk that the war trend will change, that the front will move back to include, for example, Paris. That our outposts will be overrun by the Russians . . . ” He shook his head. “It seems like an awful risk. A gamble. We’re biting off too much too soon and we’re risking the overall Program . . . ”

Watson nodded appreciatively. “You’re a wise young man. We are risking a great deal—but not everything. Unless the Russians win the war, we will prevail, John. At the moment, they’re losing. You see, the war works in our favor simply by being there. It acts as a kind of . . . a kind of
eclipse
that blocks out basic values, conventional morality, leaves people open to extremes they wouldn’t consider any other time. Take World War One, for example. After the Treaty of Versailles, Europe was at a loss. It was a junkyard. Everyone was looking for someone to blame for their plight. In Germany, national pride was nearly shattered. People were desperate for direction, identity. National Socialism offered them someone to blame. They could blame the Jews and their friends the bankers. It offered them pride: in national identity. It offered them a way out of the Depression and want: the Nation would take responsibility for rebuilding, for providing work and food. But for that, they told the people, we’ll need control. Socialist control. ‘Only, don’t get the idea we’re Marxists! We’re
National
Socialists . . . ’ ” Watson shrugged. “The same situation exists now. There are millions of homeless since the advent of the war. The refugee camps are swelling—our recruiters are finding them very fertile ground indeed. Do you know what a refugee camp is? It’s a microcosm. The camps automatically divide up by race. That’s instinct. The wogs on one side, the Africans over there, and the European natives over here. But the Red Cross and the other people who run the camps give out the food evenly. And there isn’t really enough. So the hungry native Europeans see the immigrants, the various shades of darkies, getting a good deal of the food. And they resent it . . . and they listen to us when we talk.” Watson was becoming excited now, relishing his old pseudo-intellectual fashioned racism. He ground the palms of his hands together like a man trying to crack a walnut.

Jebediah had come to listen, standing by gravely, nodding as if he understood as an adult would. And who knew how much they’d tinkered with the boy’s brain? Perhaps they’d robbed him of his childhood, Swenson thought. Perhaps he did understand Watson’s twisted logic.

Watson was saying, “I’ll tell you what these people in the camps are—they’re base clay! They’re malleable!’

“What shape will we make them into?” the boy asked, surprising them both again.

“The shape of salvation!” Watson said. “Salvation for the very clay we’re shaping. We’re teaching them strength and a taste for purity! Our people—yes, white people, Western civilization’s people—will better survive and prosper if they expel foreign impurities. Impurities of blood, religion, culture, and economic philosophy: the decadence we’ve all been living in is like the . . . the excretion, the bodily pollution of those foreign influences . . . ”

Swenson nodded and patted Watson on the shoulder, just admiringly enough so it was believable. “You could be a preacher yourself. A good one.”

Watson chuckled and said, “Oh, Rick’s preacher enough. But of course I do write . . . uh,
help
him write his sermons.”

Watson mused silently for a moment. Swenson shifted on the hard pew, aware his legs were going to sleep, his feet numb from the cold. He wanted to go back to the house, but this seemed a holy moment for Watson, and he sensed he’d best let it round itself out.

“The ironic thing,” Watson said, “is that it doesn’t matter if we’re better than they are, or
not.
It was what I was telling the two bumpkins from Idaho. It doesn’t matter if we’re better than the Jews or wogs. We’re
different,
and . . . ” He gestured toward the stained-glass figure of Darwin. “And we must struggle with them, win out over them. We must show who is the fittest! Not superior, fittest.”

Swenson said, “Yes, I think I . . . ”

Watson turned sharply to him. “
Do
you see? Really? The Russians may overrun some of our positions—but in the meantime our men are planting the seeds of the new shape among the common people, the common clay. We make contacts, we develop relationships. We attach strings. And when the new shape arises . . . Ironic, again, to think of the Jewish legend of the golem, the man-thing made from clay . . . When our golem arises, it will answer only to us.”

Jebediah’s eyes shone with an understanding that should have been beyond a ten-year-old boy.