A Song Called Youth (59 page)

“You do that, Russ.”

Praeger cut the connection.

Russ stared at the blank screen, thinking that he just hadn’t had the courage to bring up his real objection to the brain interfacing. It seemed immoral. Blasphemous somehow.

But Praeger would’ve laughed at that. Praeger was an atheist.

And now he was expected to take part in systematic racial profiling. And he just couldn’t see any way out of it.

Russ turned slowly to his console, to the list of names. Thinking,
God forgive me.

The first five people on the list were all waiting in the outer office.

He noted the first name on the list and called his assistant on the intercom. “Sandy, send in Kitty Torrence, please.”

The Island of Malta.

She saw men who were also wild dogs. Wolves, jackals, wild dogs. They went on their hands and feet, running in a crouch; unnaturally long arms, unnaturally short legs. Each lean muscle clearly etched in the moonlight; skin mottled pink and mange-gray. Hairless but for a strip of fur down the back. Wagging, semi-tumesced sexual organs. Their hands and feet black with grime, their faces—

Their faces were the worst part. She saw lust for murder and rape in those faces. But—and this was the horror that kept her from looking twice—they were human expressions. Expressions that, till now, she’d glimpsed in men’s faces for only a microsecond before the veil of civilizing conditioning was drawn again.

There were two packs. One had made a sort of camp around the mouth of a burrow, a small cave in a bank of dirt, under the dark cypresses dripping with Spanish moss. Smaller dogwomen licked and suckled dogman-infants. Others stalked the edges of the feces-littered camp, snuffling the hot swamp breeze, tick-studded ears listening, sorting through the croc grunts and cricket calls. Listening for . . . 

A splashing. Pricked-up ears caught a rustle, a panting. A prescient silence.

And then the second pack lunged from the shadows, attacking the camp.

She saw two of them rending one of the dogwomen; the dogwoman bitch tried to run but was caught with one set of jaws on her rump, the other on her neck, pulling her two different ways, pulling her apart so blood spurted, hotter than the steamy night air. While three more leapt on her husband, rending with toothy jaws and filthy talons.

She saw one of them raping a mother whose breasts swung heavy with milk under her as she tried to claw away from him, as he sodomized her while biting into the back of her neck . . . biting deep. She saw them maim their victims so they could no longer move and then the victors thrust their human faces into the wounds of the still living—

Claire sat bolt upright in bed, choking, trying not to vomit, but a sound between a gurgle and a scrape was all that escaped her throat.

The room yawed, and a dark, tooth-bared man-face thrust itself into her line of sight.

She screamed and clawed away from it. It was barking at her.

“Claire! Hey, Claire!”

The last membrane of the dream dissolved.

It was Torrence.
Danny.
It was Danny. She looked around, found she had backpedaled off the bed, had fallen, was sitting on the cold floor, her back against the cool wallpaper. Sweating. Her tailbone bruised.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice sounded funny in her own ears. “I . . . shit, what a nightmare.”

“Sounded like it was. You okay?” As he bent over her, nude, he helped her to stand. His touch on her arm making her skin crawl (a flash of the filthy talons ripping pink into red).

She pulled away from him. Wearing only panties, she went out the bedroom door and down the dark hallway. It was three in the morning. The house creaked with her footsteps. It felt fragile and porous around her, after the Colony; you could feel all its boards straining in the night wind to burst free of their nails. (Nails! God, the house had been nailed together! One step from mud huts . . . )

Claire found the bathroom and gratefully turned on the light, looked around at the old ceramic surfaces of the sink, the bathtub—she looked quickly away from the tub. It had brass legs shaped like an animal’s, complete with claws . . . 

She washed her face and smoothed her hair and tried to calm herself. At last she went back to the bedroom.

She stood for a moment in the door of the bedroom, looking at Torrence in the indirect light from the floor lamp. She felt all right about getting back into bed with him, now. He looked normal, relaxed, friendly. He was lying on his back, hands behind his head, nude under a sheet; she could see the outline of his penis angling to one side like a clock’s hand at three o’clock.

She felt a sexual stirring, which played tag with the half-suppressed sense of loathing left over from the dream . . . Paradoxical, going from a loathing of male murderousness to the damp edges of desire—some kind of primeval programming . . . The killers can provide food, shelter . . . She shuddered. But the desire didn’t go away . . . 

“Want to tell me about the nightmares?” he asked.

“No.”

“You sure? Maybe it’d help.”

“
No.
Men are arrogant. Think they can analyze everything, cure everything.”

She could see a flicker of resentment in his face. He’d been trying to help her.

“Did Steinfeld decide for sure?” she asked.

“About the raid? Yes.”

“What, um, are they going to do with Bonham?”

He glanced at her, probably wondering how she felt about Bonham. She’d promised herself to Bonham, and in return he had agreed to get her safely down to Earth. He’d done his part; she’d reneged on hers.

He said, “I don’t know. Bonham seems to think we have some kind of obligation to him. He wants money, a passport, transportation to the States. He claims he can give us some useful information about the Colony—he did say one thing that grabbed Steinfeld’s interest. That Crandall’s planning to use the Colony as his headquarters once the New-Soviet space blockade is lifted. But I don’t think Steinfeld trusts Bonham enough to let him go.”

“When he’s frustrated, he’s dangerous.”

“We’ll watch him.” He turned on one elbow, looked at her for a moment, bent and kissed her. Claire responded, but weakly.

Then she turned her head away.

She felt her face contort as she fought tears.

“What’s wrong, Claire?” he asked, with as little pressure as possible in the question.

She bubbled it out all at once, her voice pitching on the edge of a whine. “I’m all—all just . . . shit . . . It’s weird, I was wondering when this’d . . . see, I’ve been . . . with you guys, I’ve been killing people. I never thought I could really kill anyone. It seems so—this is a smug term but—so
unevolved.
And then I got caught up with you guys . . . and I killed those men. And I didn’t feel
anything
about it! It was so amazing how I didn’t feel disgust or remorse or . . . or anything. But I guess
I did,
because it’s all coming out now. Here, where the pressure’s less. It comes out in the nightmares and—God, when I saw you kill people with that shotgun . . . I mean, you’re all
my friends,
and my friends are tearing bodies apart with these tools
made
for tearing bodies apart, and . . . how could I just
accept it?”

He absorbed this for a few long moments. Then: “Like you said, you
didn’t
accept it. But you coped with it. You think there was anything else we could’ve done?”

“Yes. We could have let them kill us. Maybe that would be better than having to tear people apart.”

He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Finally she looked at him and asked, “You mad at me?”

He shook his head. “No. I do know what you mean. But, Claire—they’re planning
another Holocaust.
All the signs point to that. If we don’t stop them, more people will be murdered.”

“We have to murder a few to keep them from murdering a lot?”

“That’s it. If you insist on calling what we do murder.”

After a moment she said, in a small voice, “I guess. I guess it makes sense. But—”

“I know how you feel. It’s like nothing makes sense when you see it happening. I felt the same way more than once.”

“But, Danny . . . you
like
killing people.”

He tensed. “What? No! Or . . . the truth is, I do and I don’t.” He seemed desperate, then, to change the subject. He turned over, sat on the edge of the bed. “I like this old house. I wonder who it belongs to, really. You know, the others are all crammed together in six rooms. Steinfeld was almost sentimental, giving us this room to ourselves. Something about morale—theirs as much as yours and mine. Hey!”

He’d noticed light glinting off something half-hidden behind a rack of thirty-year-old yellowed English paperbacks on a wall shelf. The glint of a bottle. He got up, crossed to it, pulled it out. Accidentally tipping an old collection of Clive Barker stories onto the floor.

“Scotch!” A stubby, triangular bottle, half full of amber liquid.
Pinch,
it was called.

He brought it back to the bed, unscrewed the cap, and sloshed some into the empty water glass on the bedside table. Drank off half. “Damn!”

“Well, don’t
hog it.”

Twenty minutes later they both felt considerably more relaxed. In fact, she felt a little too relaxed. Any more Scotch and she’d get the spins.

Then she was in his arms, felt her body acting almost on its own, undulating against him in that way he liked . . . 

They kissed for a long time and then . . . 

“No, wait,” she said.

He flinched. His erection was so rigid it looked painful.

She smiled apologetically. “I want to, but . . . we can’t actually fuck, okay? It’s too much like something in my dream. It’s too much like stabbing tonight. But maybe . . . ”

He relaxed as she ran her still Colony-soft fingers over him, drew sensations from him, began to squeeze and pump.

He was lying sideways, his head tilted over hers so he could kiss her, trace her lips with his own tongue, her right breast nuzzling his chest as he gently parted her labia with the index and middle finger of his right hand, dipped into the wet core of her, gathering a little lubricant onto the tip of his finger, running it up onto her clitoris. She groaned and pressed against him, her hand working at him . . . Some minutes later she gasped, bucked her hips, and he let go the orgasm he’d been holding back . . . holding it back with an exquisite desperation . . . and he came, too, across her heaving belly.

Later still, as he sat up to pour them both a drink, they heard a truck approaching, saw lights prying at the shade from the drive outside.

He looked out the window onto the front of the house.

Two men he remembered from the Mossad were getting out of a van, carrying submachine guns. Now there was a third man walking ahead of them into the house, unarmed but apparently not their prisoner.
One of our people,
he thought, straining to see who it was.

The man seemed to feel Torrence watching. Just before stepping onto the porch, he looked up at the window. Torrence saw his face clearly then.

“Who is it?” Claire asked.

“It’s Michael Karakos,” Torrence said.

• 05 •

Lyon, France.

Watson was summoned to the Comm Center, in the Lyon SA installation, at three in the morning.

His bedside console had chimed, its screen lit up with three sets of identical numbers: 33-33-33. The code for the SA’s final authority. Watson dressed hastily, woke his personal bodyguard, Klaus, who always slept in his clothes, and together the two of them trudged across the frozen mud of the compound, past the guards at the checkpoints, who stepped reluctantly from their heated stations to approve passage. Watson and Klaus continued into the cube-shaped building with its rooftop orchard of antennas and sat-dishes.

Watson was mildly surprised to see that the big, warm, console-crowded viewing room was dark—except for a single green-glowing screen at the far side.

He stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the screen, pinching the bridge of his nose. He was getting one of those blasted sinus aches from the cold.

Klaus stood behind him, a foot taller than he was, and sixty pounds heavier. Tonight Klaus made him nervous. Not because he was big. Not even because he was wearing that damned opaque helmet. But because Watson had realized that Klaus was not at all stupid. And therefore his loyalty could be an act.

Across the room, that green light glowed, like some kind of graveyard phosphorescence. A gravestone of green light pulsing alone in the darkness—for him, for Colonel Watson, for no one else.

Get a grip on yourself, man. “
Klaus, turn on the blasted heat, eh?” Watson said, fumbling for the light panel. His fingers brushed the panel, and the lights came on, in sequence across the room—flick, flick, flick, flick. He crossed to the screen, footsteps echoing in the room’s chill metallic spaces, eyes blinking in the harsh blue light, as Klaus lumbered away to find the thermostat.

Watson activated the console, and the holotank above and behind the screen lit up. He’d grumbled about the expense of having a holotank installed here. TV would have done as well, he’d thought. But now he saw why Crandall had insisted on it.

His gut twisted as Crandall appeared in front of him, lifesize in the holotank, his three dimensional image glimmering as if from some numinous inner fire.

Crandall was sitting in a plain wooden armchair, his head tilted forward a little, his eyes shadowy, that same shadow playing around the faint smile. His craggy face looked gaunter than ever. His short hair, combed back from the angular forehead, had thinned. And there was something curiously inert about the set of his legs.

It occurred to Watson that he hadn’t seen Crandall standing for a while, not since the night of the ritual in the Cloudy Peak chapel. The night Johnny Stisky killed himself and Crandall’s sister, Ellen Mae.

Crandall had been secretive about the extent of his wounding after the assassination attempt . . . after the NR had tried to kill him . . .