A Song Called Youth (5 page)

“Where’d you get that phrase?”

“Steinfeld has a printout—” Let him think it’s a slip. Oh, no, I said the name.

“Steinfeld. You’re with Steinfeld.”

The rasp of cardboard as Hard-Eyes sat up.

Smoke said, “I’m just a recruiter.” Too hasty. “I’m not initiated NR.”

“Shit: I’ve got a New Resistance operative in my squat. The NATO MPs will be dropping in, and we’ll all go to the work camps.”

“Nobody’s made me as NR. I’m freelance. I’ve known Steinfeld for a while, we were indentured together. He used Mossad connections, got us out. Some others. But I didn’t follow him like a puppy, just for that. I’m freelance, Hard-Eyes, for real. I wasn’t supposed to bring you along at this stage. But what the hell, come on, come with me. At first light, I’ll take you to meet Steinfeld. The man can do one thing for you, in exchange for a little work: he can get you out of Amsterdam. To Paris.”

“One crater to another. Foxhole to foxhole. Big deal.”

“Now
that
is real, bona fide horseshit, the certified stuff. You know it’s better there. Maybe it won’t be better for long. But you won’t have to stay there long.”

Hard-Eyes didn’t reply to that. His silence said,
That’s hype, and it’s all been hype.

The crow was nestled on the back of Smoke’s neck now. It made a small, warm place there with its body. A circle of warmth and mindless friendship three inches across. Thinking contentedly,
They might just kill me in my sleep. It’s fifty/fifty.
Thinking that, Smoke focused on the three-inch circle and fell into it, and it was a gateway.

Smoke sat up and looked through the half-light at Pelter, and knew instantly that he was dead. The crow was gone. Something went cold in Smoke then.

You pathetic asshole, he told himself. You’re like a man in prison making a pet of a cockroach.

Jenkins and Hard-Eyes were gone, and Smoke didn’t care. Except, he thought,
Those pricks have eaten the bird.

But he heard a rustling behind him and turned to see Richard Pryor’s tailfeathers emerging from his canvas pouch. It had its head in a bag of bread.

Smoke tried not to feel too happy about it, but it was useless. He felt good.

A little dull-blue light shafted glumly from a hole in the ceiling. Probably from a window in the room above. Smoke looked around and saw that Hard-Eyes and Jenkins had taken all their stuff. Were definitely and completely gone. Truth was, he didn’t care much. Except he’d liked Hard-Eyes, and he knew Hard-Eyes had the necessary restlessness that Steinfeld looked for.

But fuck it. At least the crow had signed up. “Richard!” Smoke shouted.

The crow fluttered again and backed comically out of the pouch, looked at him with not a trace of remorse. The look said,
Stop yelling, asshole.

Smoke reached past the crow, into the pouch. The crow hopped onto his wrist.

“Who trained you, huh?”

The crow made a door-creaking sound in its throat.

Smoke fed it the last of his cheese and said, “Looks like I blew the recruiting. They’re gone. Their gear is gone, so they aren’t coming back. Let’s go back to Steinfeld and ask if we can go with him to Paris.”

But in the raft, when he let the currents whirl him through the echoing, swishing canyons of brick and concrete, under cover of the morning fog, he glimpsed another boat behind, and the silvery jut of the Weatherby, and knew then that Hard-Eyes was following him. Simply checking him out. And maybe Smoke would have his recruiting fee after all.

• 03 •

It was utterly artificial, and it was the most natural thing in the world. And the world wasn’t a planet anymore.

The world, now, for the Colonists, was an inter-relationship. The world was the inter-relationship between the Colony proper and its tethered satellites; between the Colony and the tethered satellites and the free-orbiting satellites, the moonbase, and various control stations on the planet Earth. Relating by lasered messages, microwaved data input, radio waves, fusion-powered ships. Each unit of information and material relation struggling to assert itself, driven by the will of the builders, despite the flux and surge of solar radiation, cosmic rays. And in fantastic defiance of the flotsam of space: meteors and asteroids.

Their world was a web of data and materialized information, and at the center of the web: FirStep. Or just,
The Colony.
An artificial world, turned outside-in. Artificial, but in his dedication speech, five years before at the official opening of the still-uncompleted Colony, Dr. Benjamin Brian Rimpler asserted that something created of human artifice is more fully natural than a biologically conventional living organism; the Colony, Rimpler said, was a compounding of nature; a splendid elaboration of nature, as an anthill, together with its ants, is a natural growth demonstrating even more principles of nature than a leaf of grass.

Claire was trying to get the general idea—human artifice as a product of nature—across to her first-grade class, and some of them understood, and others were indifferent, and still others rejected the idea out of some undefined resentment against comparing human colonies to insect colonies.

Claire stood on a grassy knoll sculpted to look as if it had come there by geological chance, and around her sat twelve children. Six boys and six girls, as per demographic control.

From the outside, the six-mile-long Colony looked like a cylinder that had swallowed something big and was digesting it boa-style. The bulge at its middle was a Bernal sphere, itself a mile and a half in diameter. The concave interior of the sphere was to have been the main inhabitable area of the Colony. It was Pellucidar. It was Mu, sunken Atlantis, the Hollow Earth. The landscape stretched away to an inside-out horizon, curving up when it should have curved down. The lengthwise axis of the Colony was pointed toward the sun, and sunlight, filtered and reflecting from enormous mirrors, glowed from circular windows at the sunward end of the oblate spheroid and was reflected by other mirrors at the farther end. It was given an auroral tint, at times, by the envelope of heavy gases artificially maintained around the Colony by the Lode-Ice Station. Almost before they’d begun to build the Colony, UNIC—the United Nations Industrial Council—had sent a series of teams into the asteroid belt where high-orbit satellite-mounted telescopes had found huge lumps of frozen gases; the “lodes” looked like great agates, but were in fact more like interstellar icebergs. A series of mining teams in UNIC-owned spacecraft had used channeled-force nuclear blasts to drive a Wagnerian procession of ten-mile-thick lumps of frozen gas back to a synchronous orbit with the slowly growing shell of the Colony. Then they built plants on the frozen asteroids, airtight factories dug into the crystalline surface, which broke the ice down into gas and, after seeding it for heightened energy absorption, routed it via electromagnetic fields into a protective envelope around the Colony: its sole purpose was filtering—it filtered the solar wind and cut back on cosmic rays, making it possible for people to live on the Colony without resorting to strangling thicknesses of heavy insulating materials. From space a comet’s tail of gases slowly burning off from the Lode-Ice Station streamed in a spectacular iridescence around the space station, making it look like some celestial tropical fish about to flicker into the deeps.

The Colony rotated once every five minutes, creating a subtle centrifugal artificial gravity. Here on the hill the gravity was slightly less than on the shore of the lake, thirty yards below them.

Overhead, filigreed clouds blurred the land . . . the land that was also overhead.

Toward the sunny end, the arbitrary south, the difference in atmospheric drag between the inner and outer layers of contained air created a hurricane’s-eye effect; cloud spirals formed and pulled apart there. You could get dizzy looking into it; you could imagine you were falling—falling up. Look “east’ or “west’ and you saw the curving vista of brown-and-green landscaping, like a tidal wave of land curling back on itself, a wave never breaking; the landscape was checkered at asymmetrical intervals by the Colony’s central housing developments.

Claire and her class sat in a cleared area just above the cactus garden, between the eccentric shapes of gray-green euphorbias and lime-green succulents. The children wore their school jumpsuits, but in the tradition of the Technics Section, the outfits were patched and pinned with ribbons and their parents’ work-section badges and viddyprogram logos. The logo patch fad came across like gang colors, a resemblance which made Claire nervous. The most popular patch advertised Grommet the Gremlin. Grommet was a cartoon monster, a
cute
monster, for God’s sake, who giggled moronically as he pulled out the wires sustaining your life-support systems if you didn’t feed him access credit for sweet-rations. He was a feral, free-floating giga-pet. His bug-eyed face leered idiotically from patches on the shoulders of eleven of the twelve children.

Claire Rimpler wore a white technicki jumpsuit, a kind of bluff social camouflage. But she was Admin, was teaching the technicki children as a volunteer—really as part of her father’s program to better relations between Admin and technicki—and had been doing it for two weeks, and for all fourteen days she’d regretted it.

Claire was twenty-one, but looked sixteen when she was smiling. She was small, with a rose-tipped pallor, soft-looking auburn hair clipped short like an EVA worker’s; her lips were a shade too large for her doll-like face. Her expressive eyes were brown-black. Her eyebrows were a trifle too thick to be feminine. But the whole, as an ensemble, was far more attractive than she knew . . . Her petiteness and girlish features deceived people into expecting docility. “The truth is, Claire’s pure Admin,” her brother Terry had said of her. “Gives orders as naturally as a technicki gives back-talk.” Her father had lectured Terry about making “classist” remarks about technickis.

No, she’d never been docile. But there were times she’d been passive, introspective, before her brother’s death—before Terry had been snuffed into a statistic, in the Third EVA Disaster. Her brother had been supervising a technicki hull-team in the construction of section D, the Earth-end of the cylinder, two years before. An EVA pod had come too close to a tethered satellite. One of the pod’s landing struts had snapped the comsat’s tether, so the satellite tumbled into the extra-vehicular team on D-sec, striking two, who spun to hit two more, a weightless domino effect that in turn spun thirty-one men off into space, most of them with ruptured suits. Only one of them was recovered alive. Six bodies were never recovered at all. In the wake of the disaster—and with the ongoing problem of the Colony’s costs outweighing its financial benefits—public pressure on UNIC had almost cut off funding. Claire’s father tried to resign as Colony Committee Chairman and Design Supervisor. New funding had come from select UNIC members, certain big corporate investors, like the Second Alliance. The SA . . . Rimpler had been persuaded to return to work . . . 

But her dad was never the same. He wouldn’t look out the ports, into space. Maybe he was afraid he’d see Terry floating out there. Floating up to the glass. Staring accusingly.

And Claire was different after that. The occasional moods of passivity vanished forever. She blamed Admin laxity for Terry’s death. Which meant she had to become Admin, to set things right. And she was Admin now. Almost completely.

Claire had explained to the children why the land overhead wasn’t going to fall on them, and how if they walked in a straight line to arbitrary east they’d eventually come back to the spot they’d left, arriving from the west, all in the same day if one walked fast enough. The children were patient through all this, except, of course, for Anthony, who ostentatiously smoked a syntharette through it all, expecting her to rebuke him for inhaling nicotine vapor, frustrated when she pointedly would not play that game.

They ate a lunch of pressed fruit, from produce grown in the Colony’s agripods, and soybutter ’n’ jelly sandwiches. And when they’d finished, Claire said, “We’re going to have to go back soon. So if anybody has any more questions . . . ?”

Chloe raised one of her small black hands and asked, “Whunna finzuhruzat?” She pointed to the arbitrary north, the inner part of the sphere away from the sun. The land here, between the meager areas of finished developments, looked calico, brown and yellow in patches, with outcroppings of raw blue metal.

“First of all,” Claire reminded her, “ask the question in Standard English. Technickinglish isn’t what you’re here to learn.”

Chloe sighed and said, laboriously, “When . . . they are—”

“When are they.”

The little girl made a moue of frustration and went on, “When
are they
going to . . . finish the . . . rest . . . of zuh—no—
of that
?”

“Good! To answer your question, the Colony is about two-thirds finished. Maybe five years more and it’ll be done.”

“But who’s going to live in the new part when it’s finished?” Anthony asked abruptly, showing off his command of Standard English.

She’d been expecting the question. And she could feel their attention had shifted, suddenly, from whispered jokes, giggling, teasing, complaining—shifted to her. Now, now they were listening.

Maybe we shouldn’t bring them on these excursions till we can move them out of the dorms, she thought. Maybe it only makes them feel frustrated.

“Everyone will be able to live there,” Claire said. “Everyone! Not all at once. There will be lots drawn to see who’s first.”

“Who’s going to program the lottery computer?” Anthony asked, and she wondered if he was really that precocious or if someone had coached him.

“The computer will be an Admin unit,” she admitted, “but it will be fair. Everyone will have a chance.”

“But—”

“Now,” she interrupted, blithely as she could, standing, “let’s go to the arcade!”

“I don’t wanna go there,” Anthony said, crossing his legs.

Claire jammed a thumbnail in her mouth, began to chew—then remembered the children were watching and quickly pulled it away, using another finger of that hand to point at Anthony. “Tony, don’t play that game with me. You love the arcade. You spend hours there. You complained when you had to come out here; you said it gave you headaches. Don’t give me that evac about not wanting to—”