A Song Called Youth (62 page)

A weary hour later, after Charlie’s fingers had begun to ache from tapping notes into his console, training was over for the night. Charlie rose to follow the others out of the room.

Smoke was standing near the door, the crow perched on his right hand. He held it near his cheek and murmured to it.

Charlie was feeling logy, thinking of bed. He stretched, rubbed at his numb buttocks once, and started to walk out past Smoke.

“Hold it, young Chesterton,” Smoke said, looking at the crow but smiling for Charlie’s benefit.

Charlie stopped, waited, wondering if Smoke was going to reproach him for something.

“You’ll continue antipropaganda training, Charlie,” Smoke said, “but we won’t be placing you in a network mole position.”

Charlie stared at him. “I can do it. I was a little sleepy tonight, but I followed the whole . . . uh . . . ”

Smoke shook his head. The crow cawed raspily, almost like laughter. “No problem with your alertness. We need you elsewhere. You know about video-evidence tampering? The AntiViolence Law programming?”

“Just the first briefing. Not much.”

“We’ve got a special project for you. You’ll be part of a team that’s going to be working with a US senator.”

Charlie stared. “What? A US senator!”

“Oh, yes. If you volunteer.”

Charlie shrugged. “You’re Smoke. You’re Jack Brendan Smoke. Without you, man, I’d still be asleep. You need it, you got it.”

The Space Colony. Married Workers’ Dormitories.

Lester was home, just stepping into their unit. Kitty Torrence heaved herself off the bunk and couldn’t keep from groaning. She ached in a dozen places; when she stood, the dull aches became sharp ones, making her suck air through her teeth. The baby squirmed in her swollen belly.

“
Duhgedda
 . . . ” Lester began.

“Lester, we said we weren’t going to talk technicki because the baby should learn standard, right? We got to get in the habit before . . . ”

“All right, okay. Don’t get up, I said.”

“Got to. Time to fix dinner.”

“Kind of thing it is, I can do it just as well. Your belly like that, isn’t room for two of us to walk around in here, anyway.”

She laughed and lay down; the dozen aching places that had begun to scream quieted to whining.

She watched him fix dinner. On the Space Colony, while they were on rations, “dinner” meant he took two airline-food trays from the storage unit and put them in the microwave.

“Be good when we can afford some real food around here,” Lester muttered. He was a small, wiry man; it was as if he’d been bred for the twenty-five-by-thirty-foot studio unit they shared.

There was a queen-size bunk in its own nook, a wafer-thin sofa that folded down from the wall, a “kitchen” area with a “dining bar” about the size of a card table. There was thin foam rubber over the floor; the walls were coated in light blue syntex, which was mottled around the edges with mildew. Once a week she hung fresh drapes of garment material over the bed alcove and above the little sofa. The light was from a soft white ceiling fixture. A small videoscreen was flush with the wall to the right of the door, which covered the screen when the door was open. Just now it was clicked to a soothe-scene. There was a selection of six soothe scenes. It also served as a TV for the techniwave channel and the twice weekly movies Admin was supposed to provide. It was also the monitor for the house Intranet. Mostly they used it for movies—only there’d been more equipment failures, and they hadn’t had a movie for a month. Lester frowned over the videoscreen, trying to change channels. “It’s fuckin’ up. You’d think with my training I could fix it but . . . problem’s not in this unit.”

“What you trying to get?”

“The mountaintop scene. Where you can see the wind blowin’ the snow off the mountain.” Lester’s favorite. “There it is . . . see if I can get it in better . . . ”

“I guess you’d rather play with that thing than give me a kiss. I don’t blame you, the way I look now.”

He chuckled and came to her, bent to kiss her. “You are the prettiest thing in creation. Of course, I need an eye implant pretty bad.”

She pretended to punch him in the shoulder. He acted as if she’d broken his arm, making the arm swing loosely, hamming it up. She smiled up at him.
He may be small but he’s a handsome man. And he’s smart.

The microwave went
ding
! and he got their meal. He put pillows behind her so she could sit up, leaning against the wall, holding the tray on her pregnant belly. He sat beside her, scowling as he ate. He resented the airline food. It was an issue with him.

The nausea caught up with her halfway through the meal, and she put the tray aside. “You were later than I thought you’d be. Does that mean, um . . . ”

“That they gave me work? Wish it did. Another bullshit day wasted in a waiting room. No fucking work. Another week of subsistence creds. I’m late ’cause I stopped off at Bitchie’s to talk to Carl.” He hesitated. “And the others. They asked me to . . . just to talk . . . ” He sounded almost puzzled.

The others. He’d gone to a meeting, then.
Colony New Resistance.

The only argument she’d had with Lester in a month happened after they’d gone to an NR meeting together. The New Resistance rep, Carl Zantello, had said some things about Admin and the Second Alliance she thought were crazy. He’d claimed they were part of some enormous racist conspiracy. Crackpot stuff. She’d agreed that Admin was mishandling the Colony, was treating people badly. But saying they were part of a new international Nazi party or something . . . Zantello was watching too many movies, she’d told Lester. And Lester had yelled at her that she’d believe it if she were black, because if she were black, she’d feel the way SA people looked at blacks; she’d notice how they related to the other races, the way they treated them.

A black man could
feel
it all coming down. Maybe some kind of survival skill evolved in American blacks, Lester said. A keen awareness of prejudice in others; a talent for sensing the plans that followed the prejudice.

A tendency to slide into plain old paranoia, she’d said.

Two weeks after the meeting she’d been called to the Security office, to see Russ Parker. Not a bad man, she thought.

But he’d talked to Lester, too, and Lester had come home angry.
“They’ve been watching me,”
he’d said.

“So—they asked you to make a speech?” she asked now.

“Kind of.” He grinned. “I guess it was, yeah. I talked about the prejudicial work-assignments. I swear to God—l never expected to see this on the Colony in the goddamned twenty-first century. It’s like all that Civil Rights work never happened—it took so
little
to start them backsliding. They’re hiring Caucasians, and a few ass-kissing Spanish and Japanese. And nobody else is getting work assignments. So nobody else is getting anything but subsistence creds. Most of the technickis—even the white ones—are bitching about it. In private. But everybody’s afraid to bitch in public because of the ‘preventative detention’ bullshit.” He ticked off the names of the technicki political prisoners on his fingers. “Judy Wessler, Jose Arguello, Abu Nasser, Denny Bix—all of ’em arrested, no one gets to talk to them. Shit, we don’t even know if they’re still alive.” He took a deep breath and then, staring fixedly at the snowy mountaintop scene, said, “So me and Carl decided the time’s come for another general strike.”

“Lester . . . ” She wanted to shout at him. But she knew how he’d react. She needed to change her tactics. She carefully modulated her voice and said, “Lester, you’re right. We should all go on strike again. It’s called for. But—we got to think about
timing.
While the New-Soviet blockade’s on, the SA can do what they want with us. I mean, you said they were some kind of Nazis, right? And they know you’re a socialist. Black is bad enough—but socialist! If they’re fascists, they don’t have any conscience about hurting people—maybe even killing people—that stand up to them. Especially black socialists, Lester.”

“That’s exactly the reason we ought to stand up to them,” he said. “Because it’s immoral to give in to people like that. And giving in’s even more dangerous, maybe, in the long run, than fighting them now. They’re consolidating their power. We’ve got to take some of that power from them while we can. We got to face the risks.”

She repressed the outburst of exasperation she felt at his bravado. Holding back wasn’t easy—being pregnant made you cranky. She wanted to yell, to grab him and shake him. But it was especially unwise to argue when you were in the Colony housing units. The claustrophobic compactness of a unit acted like an electrical transformer on the current of anger, pulsing it up to absurd extremes.

“Okay, Lester—yes, we ought to stand up to them. But . . . but don’t you think it’d be more, um, more powerful . . . that it’d give us, you know, a better chance, if you wait till the blockade’s over? So they don’t just use it as an excuse to come down on you? They’ve got to lift the martial law alert eventually.”

He frowned, and shook his head. But after a moment he said, “Maybe. Maybe so.”

The videoscreen gave off an uncharacteristic crackle. In the image, electronic snow fell over the mountain snow. They stared at the screen, both wondering the same thing: Are they bugging us? Listening in on this? Is it that far along?

And then a voice spoke from the intercom grid over the door. It was a computer simulation of a woman’s soothing but firm voice.
Little Mom,
some of the Colonists called her. Or else they called her
Libish
: Technicki for “lying bitch.”

“Please take note. Please take note,” the voice said sweetly. “The Boulevard of Lights” . . . that was Corridor C . . . “—has been sealed off due to flooding. Do not attempt to enter the corridor until entry is reauthorized. The corridor flooding is believed to be caused by sabotaged pipes. If you have any information about the vandals, your security report will be treated confidentially. Should your report lead to the apprehension of the vandals, you will be rewarded, also in confidence. Remember, helping Security maintain order is helping
you!
Thank you for helping yourself!” She repeated the message in technicki.

So someone had sabotaged the pipes at Corridor C . . . 

Kitty looked at Lester questioningly. He shook his head. “It wasn’t us.”

The videoscreen gave out another raucous buzzing—and then the image cleared. Kitty and Lester stared at it. They looked at one another; then back at the screen.

It was different. The scene was an endless digital loop, and it should always be the same sequence, wind blowing soft banners of powdery snow from a Himalayan mountaintop; feathery whiteness blown from the stark, dignified peak, trailing into crystal-blue sky. But now there was
a man
in the mountaintop image. He was sitting on the mountain’s peak, kicking the snow up with his feet like a little kid, laughing. He was
nude,
for God’s sake, on a mountaintop. And he was an old man. Skinny, potbellied, white-haired. And evidently crazy.

“
Yugg’nshid!”
Lester swore in technicki. “
Hooftzit?”

“I don’t know,” Kitty murmured. The image of the man was small. It was hard to see his face. “But he looks familiar . . . ”

In another part of the Colony, at exactly that moment, someone else found the image familiar.

“Shoot me for a wetback, but by God I think that’s Professor Rimpler!” Russ burst out.

“It is indeed,” Praeger said. He was on a separate screen in Russ’s office, monitoring the transmission anomaly from his quarters. “This reinforces my opinion: There is a Rimpler cult. And they’ve broken into our system somehow.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t know what else it could be. But if the guy’s a hero to them, why they making him look . . . like that? Like he’s gonzo-whack. Seems to me—shit!” The mountaintop image had vanished, replaced by a close-up of Rimpler’s leering face. The face tried to speak, but the words came out garbled.

The image on the screen flickered, vanished. The snowy mountaintop returned, sans Rimpler.

“What are our chances of tracing the source of the superimposed images?” Praeger asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask the techs. But until we know when it’s going to happen ahead of time, it’s hard to be prepared to trace anything . . . ”

“Then have the computer continually monitor all channels for anomaly. At the first anomaly it should trace automatically.”

“That’ll take time to set up—in fact, with the damage that’s been done in Central, I’m not sure if . . . ”

Russ was interrupted by the red flash from the Security Priority screen. He thumbed
acknowledge
and tapped to tie it in to Praeger’s line.

One of Russ’s technical investigators came onto the priority screen. It was Faid, a tech-intelligence officer who’d come to the Colony from the People’s Republic of Palestine; he’d been one of Russ’s own men before Praeger brought the SA in. He was one of the few left from the original security roster. “Right, we have source of water leakings in Corridor C, Chief. Martinson is having it for you, what?” That was just the way Faid talked. “He is made determination.”

“Put him on.”

Martinson’s lean black face came on the screen. “The valves are auto-operated by the Tertiary Life Support System. The computer opened two of the unconnected valves. It simply opened them and increased water pressure in them. Whoever programmed Tertiary . . . ” He shrugged.

“Must’ve been. Thanks. The water shut off?”

“Shut off and permacapped. They’re draining for recycling now. And that’s all we’ve got for you.”

Russ nodded and cut the transmission.

“Why are those men still in the field?” Praeger asked.

Russ was caught by surprise. “Uh—Faid? Martinson? Why?”

“According to the new personnel guidelines, they should have been replaced. Especially this Faid person. He’s culturally contraindicated for Security.”

“Because he’s an Arab? Sir, he may be a . . . a wog . . . but he’s a damn efficient one. You saw how fast he got on top of—”