A Song Called Youth (6 page)

“I like it here, and I want to stay.”

“Anthony, has someone been—” And then she broke off, seeing the men from TechniWave coming, and she understood it all.

There were three of them. One with the cam-transmitter. Beside him was a guy with his look so burnished he must be the anchorman. And a third guy, an X-factor, might be the one who’d planned this.

The cameraman wore a backpack-fed shouldercam/directional mike and a headset; the cam was mounted on his shoulder like a second, robotic head.

She recognized the reporter, now—Asheem Spengle. He wore the fashionable triple-Mohawk in the technicki colors—white, silver, and gold—and also a white I’m-just-one-of-the-people jumpsuit. He was regular-featured, glib, a human cipher. The third man wore a flatsuit: a suit in which the jacket and vest and tie were false, just lapels and a tie-knot and vest-front sewn onto a one-piece outfit. He was sharp-eyed, coning his lips to seem perpetually thoughtful.

Anthony jumped up excitedly, seeing them. “Misser Barkin!” he began. “I—”

The man in the flatsuit shook his head at Anthony but smiled, showing an overbite.

Anthony caught the cue and shut up. The reporter and the cameraman stopped just a few yards from Claire and the class; the reporter stepped in front of the camera, facing it, his back to Claire, and nodded. The cameraman was already focused, waiting. He hit a switch on his belt. A green light flashed on at the side of the little camera, and Spengle said,
“Routen Admin Park talkwid Adminteach Claire Rimplerner stoods—”
And went on.

Stunned, mentally treading water, Claire listened, translating for herself.
We’re out in Admin Park talking with administrative teacher Claire Rimpler and her students and trying to get her reaction on a disturbance that was reported to be taking place here—

Claire thought, Should I just walk away from it? That might make us look pretty bad. And I’m responsible for the kids. And then they’d just quote Anthony. Or whoever’d coached him.

But then Spengle turned to her and asked her a question.

The camera was on her. His question had been recorded, Claire’s reply would be recorded, a recording to be edited for a TechniWave transmission to the whole technicki pop of the Colony.

Translated from technicki:

Claire:
If you want to talk to me, I have to know if this is live or recorded.

Spengle:
We’re recording, Ms. Rimpler.

Claire:
I had two years of communications, and I know that machine: it can transmit. If you’ll do this live so I can say my piece without editing, I’ll submit to an interview. Otherwise I can’t be sure of getting a fair opportunity to reply.

Spengle:
I can’t guarantee—

Claire:
Then I can’t answer questions. It’s not fair.

Spengle conferred with the flatsuiter.

Claire used the delay to call Admin on her fone. She explained the situation to Judy Avickian in Central Telecast. “Just watch the broadcast, Judy. Ring me if it’s not coming through live.”

“You got it.”

Claire replaced the fone in her pack and turned to Spengle.

Spengle said, “Ms. Rimpler, we’ll have link-up in a minute or two. In the meantime—”

He looked at the gawking assemblage of children. “I heard someone up here has refused to go back to the dorms.”

“Anthony!” they chorused. “Z’Anthony!”

Claire said, “That’s something you must already know, Spengle, since your people—”

Anthony interrupted her by stepping up to Spengle, half turning so the camera could pick him up clearly. He’d been drilled well.

A finger-sized directional mike on the bottom of the camera swiveled back and forth between Spengle and Anthony as they spoke.

“We’ve got live,” the cameraman said, pressing the earplug of his headset.

Spengle nodded, repeated his earlier spiel, and bent to interview Anthony. From technicki:

“Your name is Anthony Fiorello?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re one of the children refusing to go back to the dorms?”

“There’s only one refusing!” Claire broke in. Spengle ignored her. And probably it didn’t pick up on the mike.

“Why is that, Anthony?”

“It’s crowded there and it smells bad and I’m just as good as Admin people, so how come I can’t live in the Central with the parks where it’s nice like the Admins?” Just a touch mechanical, hinting at rote.

“Anthony—how many people live in Colony? Do you know?”

“Sure, we learned that. About ten thousand people.”

“And how many live in Central in the nice dorms, or in the Open out of all that?”

“One thousand.”

“Does anything else bother you about all this, Anthony?”

“Well, I came out here and it looks so empty! There’s some houses down there, but they’re a long way away! There’s room here for technics and maintens!”

Claire was fed up. “You want to interview me, it’s got to be now. I’m due back at Admin,” she called out. “Come on, kids!” She turned to the others. “Get your things together; we’re going to have to go soon.” Some of them stirred, others stood unmoving, gaping at the cameraman, mesmerized by the technological totem on his shoulder. The reporters, she realized, had usurped her authority over the children. And that was a bad omen.

“Ms. Rimpler,” Spengle said, “has just said she
hasn’t got time
to talk with us.” Heavy sarcastic emphasis on
hasn’t got time.
“So we’ll have to go back to you, Ben, at TechniWave Central—”

“It isn’t true!” Claire shouted, rushing up to the camera. “That’s not what I said!—” And then she stopped talking, just stopped, feeling foolish, realizing the light was out on the camera, that it was no longer transmitting and hadn’t been for a while.

And Spengle had turned his back to her, was walking away in close, soft conversation with the flatsuiter . . . 

Half an hour later Claire stood alone on the platform of the park railstop, watching the car that had come along the axis rail-line to take the children back to the dorms; watching it recede as it carried the children to the north end of the Colony, the dorms and the uncompleted area, while she waited for the train that would take her to the arbitrary south. Hating the glaring symbolism of the moment, she chewed a thumbnail, thinking that once the camera was gone, Anthony had lost interest in boycotting the dorms. He was first on the train, eager for the arcades.

She’d crossed to the southward station and stood looking toward the huge retina-like windows above Admin central. A ring of verdant green encircled the windows. Within the ring, mist curled in gentle spirals, refracting the light in muted rainbows. It was quiet in the parkland; there was a gentle, manufactured breeze smelling of growing things—and only faintly of air filterant—and for a moment the place looked like the paradise it had been designed to be. But then the vent-breeze shifted and she caught the soiled-socks odor of the dorms’ overworked air recycler. And the paradise was gone. Paradise has always been fragile.

“Japanese tourists,” Samson Molt said, “never change. The Japanese keep their traditions. Their tea rituals. Their sushi schools and their chopsticks and that Japanese packaging. And the way they act in foreign places is always the same. Since I was a boy, they never changed. They’re faddish in some ways—but really, they never change. Could almost be the same tour group I saw in New York as a lad.”

Samson Molt and Joe Bonham were lounging at an “outdoor table” at the south end of the arcade. The six clubs, two digital arcades, a handful of boutiques, and two cafés were “the Strip,” which was the closest thing the Colony had to authorized nightlife. Molt and Bonham preferred the unauthorized nightlife. But that didn’t start for hours yet, end of the third shift, when the maximum number of B-section workers would be freed up to spend cred.

The tourists were eight nearly identical (to Molt’s eyes) Japanese with the faddish forehead-strapped cameras, each camera with its remote focuser that snapped down over the right eye, transforming the socket into something reptilian. They wore onepiece Japanese Action Suits, JAS for short, in tastefully splashy pastels, soft material. They chattered and pointed, winking to make the headband cams take pictures. Each stop along the arcade was an orgy of you-take-my-picture-and-I’ll-take-yours, posing in front of everything, so that half of what they were photographing was blocked by their bodies.

Molt wondered which ones were industrial spies. The Japanese were said to be planning their own space colony.

Their guide was a tall, demure black woman making a valiant effort to look interested as she droned, “ . . . the Colony took twenty-four years to achieve basic livability for non-astronaut personnel . . . ” drone “ . . . begun in secret early in this century . . . Richard Branson was an . . . ” drone “ . . . now owned by UNIC, the United Nations Industrial Council, five major international corporations who pooled their resources for matching funds from the UN . . . ” drone “ . . . The Colony manufactures goods which can only be made in zero or light gravity, as well as operating the first of a chain of interplanetary solar power stations which soak up solar energy and transform it to microwaves transmitted to receptors in the Gobi and Mojave deserts . . . ” drone “Although UNIC is still operating in the red, it expects to break even next year and to begin a profit-making phase in the following year . . . We begin our tour at the arcade because it links Tourist Arrival with Colony Open, the parkland area which as you will see in just a moment verges on the paradisial in its . . . ” Drone.

The tourists clicked and snapped and chattered on, and the Strip was itself again, shorn of the kitschy glamor of their enthusiasm. Like most of the Colony corridor areas, the Strip seemed more worn, more used, more frayed and grimy than things on Earth, though it had been built only a few years before. Which surprised visitors. They expected the pristine polish of a top-tech chips clinic. But the Colony was almost a closed system. And replacing anything, repainting anything, was more costly here . . . 

And now the Strip was like a third-generation hand-me-down toy in a grubby nursery, its colors faded or smeared with the grease of too much touching; like a seaside amusement park long since gone to seed.

Across from the French-style Café Crème was the white seashell-shaped metal awning of the Captain Halfgee club. Soft, moving lights glowed behind the mermaids painted on its plastex windows; two customers came out, still dripping chlorinated water, towels draped over their shoulders, carrying drinks in plastic cups.

The “street” of white synthetics was nine yards wide, and dingy; the ceiling, three yards overhead—unusually high for a Colony corridor—was blue, fluffy clouds painted on at intervals. The clouds looked as if they ought to be laundered with bleach.

Molt’s gaze wandered down the street, where the crowd thickened at the one Admin-sanctioned casino. He considered going up for blackjack. But no one in the casino was permitted to lose more than ten newbux in cred, nor win more than twenty, and there was no way, in Molt’s view, you could work up a good gambler’s sweat when the stakes were so low.

The other clubs and cafés were articulated in bright, brassy, circus-rococo colors, neon-trimmed and flashing, but it was all Admin operated; and to Molt it looked like a miniature setup for children, like the department store “Santa Claus Lane” of his boyhood.

“See the fucking elves making toys,” he muttered. Even the Strip’s pornography parlor was watered-down, the porn softcore and revoltingly well photographed. Tasteful. Not much fun at all.

He lit a syntharette, not because he wanted one, but because this was one of the few areas in the Colony where the nico-vapor was permitted. And because there was nothing else to do. Just nothing else to fucking
do.

Molt was a heavy man with a brickish complexion and sharp blue eyes and a tousle of rusty hair. He leaned both elbows on the plastic table, his cup of three percent beer between his hands. He wore genuine faded Levi’s, and a real-wool knit pullover, dull yellow, holes at the elbows and shoulder seams. Bonham—a sad-eyed man with thinning brown hair, a long nose—wore a gray pilot’s uniform without insignia, two-piece, the short jacket taut across his wide, flat chest. He wasn’t a pilot, which is why the uniform had no insignia. The uniform was supposed to help him pick up women. Like Molt, Bonham was a pilot’s second, which officially made both men Technic Union. Both had two years of college and, socially, both looked down on technickis. But both men were Neo-Marxists and in the political abstract regarded the technickis as brethren workers.

Bonham had a way of fading in and out of conversations like a radio with a faulty frequency modulator. He could be dreamy and then diamond-hard analytical, by quick turns. He leaned back in his chair, one hand toying with an empty glass, his mind somewhere else.

“Bonham,” Molt said, leaning forward, lowering his voice meaningfully. “Fuck these tourists. You want to go to that club they got in the Open?”

Bonham stared glassily at a smudged cloud on the ceiling.

“Joe, dammit!” Molt said sharply.

Bonham snapped his eyes down from the cloud. “Yeah, I heard you. Japanese tourists. Pain in the ass.”

“I asked, You wanna go to the club in the Open?”

“The Tavern on the Green? Out in the Admin’s Open? You know what that place costs? Three bux for a cup of tea.”

“Yeah? It’s just—I never been there. But now that you mention it—I can’t feature those prices. Forget it.”

“Of course, the cost is one way they keep it exclusive, keep the technics and the maintens out. I say we spend the money and make ourselves seen there. A Statement, man.”

“Isn’t worth the price.”

“It would be for the principle of the thing.”

“I can’t afford the principles. And I’m on probation. If you get drunk, start making speeches, you’ll get us into shit with Security.” He shook his head dolefully. “Hey, Joe—those new Security bulls they got are
mean.
Fuck it, let’s wait for the Afters. You can get something that’ll get you drunk, lose some real money, get yourself sick like a man ought to be able to.”