A Song Called Youth (52 page)

He was in the back of the cave, sitting on a sleeping bag. Claire lay on a bag beside him, asleep. He wanted to reach out, stroke her hair, but he didn’t want to wake her. And they’d never made love; there was no real physical intimacy between them.

The fire popped and sizzled. It was a skewed pyramid of thin, twisted tree branches gradually collapsing into the wavery column of yellow flame. The wounded lay nearby, seven of them; one groaning, the others too quiet. Two of them looked like they’d died. On the far side of the flame the little Spaniard, Danco, sat with an old AK-47 across his knees, staring into the fire. Danco had a brown, saturnine face; bristling, arching eyebrows; a small, pointed beard; and the devil’s own red mouth. He wore fatigues, a watch cap, and a battered brown leather jacket.

Torrence looked at his watch and saw that the crystal had splintered into a coarse star; the digits were frozen.

He stretched, biting his lip at the pain. It felt like he had some cracked ribs, bruises, and a lot of little wounds.

He felt dull, creaky with aches, hungry. But the disorientation, the panic—all that was gone.

Scowling and muttering, Levassier came into the cave carrying a packet of freeze-dried soup mix and a bucket of snow for melting. Torrence tried not to stare at the food. They might not have enough for anyone but the wounded.

But everyone ate. Bonham sitting near Danco on the other side of the fire, eating greedily, staring at Claire and Torrence. Claire woke when she smelled the food cooking. By degrees, as the guerrillas talked over the mess kits of soup and canned stew, Torrence pieced the picture together. They’d found the cave a mile and a half up the mountain from the road. There were twenty-five of them intact enough to fight.

Two SA jets had gone over, probably looking for them. The sentries were fairly sure they hadn’t been spotted. There was cloud cover, blocking satellite reconnaissance. Steinfeld had used a pack-radio to try to reach the other SA units, and the Mossad, transmitting coded messages. No reply so far.

The SA was probably triangulating troops in the area by now. They’d be along soon enough.

So what do we do?
Torrence wondered
.
It would be tough to run farther, with the wounded, and with scarce supplies.

Steinfeld looked grim.

After the meal—it would be their only meal that day—Torrence stood a watch outside the cave. The clouds that had drifted in at midmorning had thickened, began to unspool thin streamers of sleet. Torrence trudged from one miserably uncomfortable spot to another in the shallow, open area of broken rock outside the narrow cave mouth, slipping on ice-glazed patches of gray snow. A faint wash of smoke drifted out of the cave entrance but was quickly sucked away by the drizzly wind. The wind burned his nose and ears, and the auto-shotgun was a dead weight on its shoulder strap.

He was dismally grateful when, an hour after sunset, just when it was getting
really
cold, Steinfeld sent out the dour, pallid Frenchman, Sortonne, to relieve him.

Torrence found Claire sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bag, cleaning a rifle, forehead creased with concentration. Danco had taught her how to clean the rifle just the day before.

Now Danco watched, grinning, as Torrence sat down beside her, his hands and fingers tingling in the sudden warmth from the campfire.

They didn’t speak for a while. Then Claire said, “The sky clear out there?”

“No. You wondering about the Colony?”

She hesitated, then nodded, frowning over the assault rifle. She’d put it back together perfectly. “No news. When I left, it was on the verge of anarchy. And the New-Soviets were closing in. I’m not even sure if the damn place is still up there. Just to see it . . . ”

He asked, “You can see it with the naked eye?”

“If you know how to look. It looks like a star.”

“I guess you’re not used to being down here yet. Joining the NR is a bad way to readjust to the planet.”

She stared at her grime-blackened hands, her broken, dirt encrusted nails. She shrugged and looked around. “Actually . . . ” She smiled sadly. “The cave is sort of comforting—the Colony’s corridors weren’t so different, really . . . God, I just wish I could know if . . . ” She broke off, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Wish you could know if he’s dead?” Torrence asked.

After almost ten seconds she nodded, very slowly. “If Dad is dead.”

They didn’t speak again for nearly two hours. The fire burned low; darkness gathered itself around them. Steinfeld, Levassier, and Danco talked softly at another campfire nearer the front. Most of the others were asleep.

Torrence and Claire sat side by side on the sleeping bag, knees drawn up, hugging themselves for warmth. Suddenly she said, in a whisper, “It’s getting cold in here. But I . . . it’s like I can hardly feel the cold, like the feeling is in someone else. I left the Colony to get away from the fighting, and to get away from the way the place was falling apart—the place I lived all those years—and, shit. Look at me.”

“You could get to the States. Steinfeld could probably arrange it.”

Mentally adding to himself,
If we get out of this alive.

She shook her head. “The Second Alliance took the Colony. Enslaved everyone there. It was bad enough I ran away from the cocksuckers once. I couldn’t live with twice. I want to stay where the fight is—the fight against the SA. And for Dad’s sake, this is my way to fight Praeger.” It was difficult to make out her expression in the dimness. “Maybe I should’ve stayed in the Colony. Fought them there.”

“What would have happened if you’d stayed?”

“I’d have been arrested. Interrogated. Probably killed. They’d have made it look like the rebels killed us, I guess.”

“So how can you feel guilty about not staying? You couldn’t have fought them, you were trapped, cornered.”

“Feelings aren’t rational. I mean, how many times in a person’s life do they feel guilty for something they can’t really control?”

He had to concede that. “Know what you mean.”

“And today I got so . . . I just
felt fucked.
Those things that weren’t even human were hunting us . . . those unmanned flying
machines
 . . . ” Her voice broke. “I was more scared than I thought a person could be without their heart blowing up.”

“Me too.”

“Were you?” She sounded surprised.

“Scared shitless.” He reached out, tentatively laid his hand on hers. Started to withdraw when he felt her move but she turned her hand palm upward, squeezed his hand, leaned toward him, and pressed her head against his shoulder.

Torrence had an overwhelming urge to embrace her—and he gave in to it. She returned the embrace. He felt her shaking as she sobbed softly.

He held her for a long time, being careful of the wound on her arm, till it was too cold to stay atop the sleeping bag. “Let’s get under the covers,” he whispered. “And sleep,” he added, to let her know he wasn’t going to make a move on her.

She nodded. They took off their boots and climbed into the double sleeping bag. Both of them smelled sour. But it had been a long time since that had mattered.

They held one another against the cold, and the fear.

He’d almost gone to sleep when he felt her moving against him, a kind of blind nuzzling of her hips. He felt his cock harden; she felt it, too, and pressed her crotch against it. Both of them ached, and her wound burned on her upper arm—but that made the caressing more piquant, a deeper relief. She unbuttoned her blouse and pressed his rough hands to her breasts.

There was some fumbling with zippers, and pants buttons, but in a few minutes they were joined, with Claire on top, straddling him, sighing softly, almost sobbing; she was very warm, and very wet, inside. And when she came, she pulled his face to her breasts and he was amazed—exquisitely amazed—to experience the sheer, silken luxury of them here, in this place, this animal’s den on the cold shore of a battlefield.

At ten the next morning Steinfeld, Levassier, Danco, and Torrence held a conference. They looked at maps on the glowing blue screen of a hand computer; they collated what data they had about SA, NATO, and New-Soviet troop movements and came to a bitter conclusion. To leave there was probably suicide. To stay there was to await execution.

They decided to go through the mountains. The wounded would have to be abandoned—or put to death. No one said this but everyone knew it. There was real sorrow in Steinfeld’s eyes.

They’d never had to do it before. Torrence wondered if they could bring themselves to go through with it.

The question was moot, because before the guerrillas could move out, the enemy came.

They heard the thudding of choppers, and an electronically amplified voice booming outside the cave entrance, its absurd verbosity echoing between the rocks: “
This is the Second Alliance Security Force acting on behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Come out of your camp unarmed, with your hands on top of your heads. If you surrender, you will not be harmed. Repeat, if you surrender . . . 
”

There was no question of surrender. They would put them under extractors. You can’t keep anything back from an extractor. They’d know what Steinfeld knew, and that would mean arrests, hundreds of arrests . . .

Steinfeld looked almost relieved. They wouldn’t have to abandon the wounded.

They looked at Steinfeld. Steinfeld said, “Deploy for defense.”

• 02 •

Seen from Earth, it was a star. But inside . . . 

Dan “Hard-Eyes” Torrence had a sister. He assumed she was safe in the same fortresslike housing project their parents lived in, near New York City.

But Dan Torrence’s sister, Kitty, had married while he was in Europe. She’d married a technicki, a black technicki in fact, and she’d emigrated to FirStep, the Space Colony, to be with her husband, Lester, who was a communications technician. That was just before the New-Soviets blockaded the Colony.

She’d married, but her best friend, a feminist, had persuaded Kitty to keep her last name. She was still Kitty Torrence.

Kitty’s job on FirStep was simple and ugly. She kept the sludge pipes in the recycling center from clogging. Kitty was a wide-framed woman, her hair brown and coarse, her features blunt, hands and feet a little too big. She’d once overheard someone calling her “horsey.” Okay; she was not a pretty woman, and not unusually intelligent. But she was strong and determined, and her eyes were a nice shade of blue, almost violet, and Lester adored her.

The recycling center was an enormous barn-shaped room with aluminum-gray walls and six-foot-thick flat-black pipes. The joints of the pipes were dull silver. Harsh fluorescent light buzzed overhead; steam and rancid smells escaped from loose pipe joints; the atmosphere was faintly cloudy, like a glass of gin left out for a couple of days.

Kitty’s legs hurt, and she was thirsty. Parched. Her lips were cracked. There was a steady, dull background heat in the room, and in it swam the human odors wrung from the disposable clothing. The heat, noise, and smell were always there, and after a while it felt strange to go out into the corridor where the air was cooler and cleaner—and so much quieter.

Because the pipes roared all day. They roared and groaned, as discarded one-use garments and other refuse from the previous two days, heated by the same chemical process that liquefied it, bubbled and slopped through the pipes. No one knew why the pipes gave out those pathetically human groaning noises, but the superstitious technickis assumed the ghosts of Samson Molt and Professor Rimpler were trapped in the pipes, because probably Admin had simply fed them into the recyclers. The younger technickis—the younger ones were more superstitious—would hear the groans and mutter, “Cover me, Gridfriend . . . ”

The four biggest pipes emerged from the wall to the right, slanted down to the first separation vats; a plethora of smaller pipes sprouted from the vats. A catwalk ran along the pipes and around the enormous vats, and Kitty walked along the catwalk, checking to see that the pipes weren’t clogging. The colonists used disposable clothes most of the time because laundering would consume too much volume, too much water on the Colony, and because there were strict weight limits on what could be shipped up from Earth; the weight allowance for clothing was small. Each dorm or living unit had its own garment printer; blocks of the raw garment material, to be fed into the printer like reams into a photocopier, were delivered once a week. Some wore cloth clothing on the Colony; there were even boutiques. But most preferred the economy and flexibility of disposable clothing. Print it out in any style you programmed the printer for that day. Wear it twice and toss it into the chute. The chute took it to the sludge pipes, where it was soaked in Breakdown, which broke it down into sludge with the other recycled trash; its main components were drawn by inertia and the Colony’s centrifugal force down to recycling, down to the big pipes where Kitty walked along the catwalk.

Kitty was five months pregnant, but it didn’t show a whole lot. She wore a shift to help conceal it. She was afraid they’d lay her off if they knew she was pregnant. But the supervisor was technicki; she knew what conditions were like for technicki, she knew Kitty and her husband needed the work credit.

Every five steps Kitty had to stop and slide open the little window on the top of the pipe; usually a little sludge spat up at her when she did this and she’d snatch her hand away to keep from getting sludge and Breakdown on it. She’d hold on to the rail and peer into the pipe, and if she saw it was gumming up, she’d use the sludge fork clamped inside the window to clear away the blockage. Then she’d close the window and go on to the next joint. And when she got to the vat, she’d cross over to the other side, go back up the next pipe. And when she got to the wall, she’d cross over, go back down the pipes again. On and on like that all day.

She guessed it was better than working down in Fecal Sewage where Mary Beth worked. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, because the traffic between Earth and the Colony was so reduced, and the Colony had been damaged in the vandalism, sabotage, the riots of the Technicki Rebellion. Now that the comm transmitters were damaged and they were waiting, endlessly, for comm parts to be sent from Earth, Kitty’s husband had to make do with occasional video maintenance work. The Colony wasn’t going to let anyone starve, it was said; if you couldn’t pony up the work-cred for food, they gave you rations—bad food and not enough of it. These were difficult, transitory times, Admin told them. Have to tighten the belts a few notches. But it would be over soon.