A Song Called Youth (64 page)

“We’re in danger because of the Fascists?”

“Yes. And lately . . . I’m afraid the CIA is looking for us. We think they’ve been spying on the island with a satellite. They’re very dangerous. They’re working with the Second Alliance.”

“CIA . . . ?” She frowned. “James Bond’s friends?”

He blinked at her. “Who’s James Bond?”

“They showed him on video night in the auditorium. He’s a spy hero. He’s from England. He has a friend named Felix who’s from the CIA who helps him sometimes.” She drew her feet up onto the padded table, crossed them, and scowled over a blister on her heel. She prodded it, squeezed it.

“Leave that alone,” Smoke said. “You’ll get it infected or something.”

She turned and poked the foot at his stomach, laughing. He caught her ankle and held it, tickled her foot. She squealed and pulled it away, and almost fell off the table. Smoke grabbed her, his heart pounding. God. What if he lost her like that. Something stupid. Fall and hit her head.

She regained her balance, and lowered herself to the floor. She looked up at him gravely. “The CIA are trying to hurt us?”

“They’re . . . not James Bond’s friends in real life. They’re a sort of secret government within the government of the USA. Every so often the rest of the government catches them at something they shouldn’t have been doing and they, um, rein them in a little. Like a dog on a leash. But the dog gets away again eventually. And it has again.”

“What did they do that they shouldn’t have been doing?”

“Oh God. Maybe we’d better wait till you’re older. It’s complicated.”

She gave him her chilliest glare. There was something very adult in it that made him laugh. “I’m not stupid,” she said.

“I know. Okay. Well—I’ll give you some examples. After World War Two the CIA recruited Nazis—like Klaus Barbi, a man who tortured and murdered a lot of people in France. They recruited them to be spies. Later on they helped them escape to Central America and South America. These were the worst kind of Nazis, too . . . Something else the CIA has done is . . . well in the past it has overthrown democratically elected governments.”

A certain distance in her eyes told him he’d lost her on that one.

Smoke went on, “You know what democracy is. You know what elections are.”

“Oh, yes.” That glare again.

“I know, I know you know.” He smiled. He put a hand to his right shoulder. Empty. The crow wasn’t there. The surgeon wouldn’t let him bring him in here. He was in a cage, poor fellow, for the moment. “Anyway, um, America pretends to approve when a country elects its own government democratically. But in the twentieth century the American CIA used covert operations—secret spy operations of a very ugly sort—to overthrow and assassinate some very decent democratically elected leaders. Like a man who was elected president of Iran. This was mid-twentieth century. He wanted to nationalize the oil industry, which wasn’t convenient for American companies. So they pushed him out—they said he was a Communist, but he wasn’t—and they installed the Shah instead and that led to a generation of torture and killing and repression, things the Shah did to people who disagreed with him, all with the help of the CIA, and
that,
the repression, that led to a revolution run by people who hated us. The Ayatollah. It was a big mess. And the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala—I think this was in the 1950s—ah, they overthrew him because he wanted land reform to help the peasants and that was not convenient for an American company called the United Fruit Company. They said he was a Communist and they got rid of him. He wasn’t a Communist but they said he was. Then they set up a military dictatorship that tortured and murdered people for generations. They did this in Chile and a lot of places. There was always a big mess afterwards. They always made things worse for everyone. It was a question of protecting the interests of big American companies who had a stake in the . . . ”

He let his voice trail off, seeing her distress. She was standing there with one foot on the other, chewing her lip, frowning at the floor. She hadn’t been able to follow it all, and didn’t want to admit it. He was relieved. He didn’t want to have to tell her these things. She was just a little girl. He was afraid she would ask him about the torture. The murders the CIA had sponsored: the death squads. He didn’t want to have to tell her.

And it was a relief to see the limits of her comprehension, the limits of her precocity, because he wanted her to be a little girl. His child, his daughter, his proxy retreat into innocence.

“You get the idea,” he said gently. “The CIA pretend to be the friends of freedom but they’re the opposite—or sometimes they are. So we have to protect you from them . . . And people like them . . . And the implant chips are going to change the world, and we have to get a sort of jump on that change, to use it for our protection.”

She looked up at him, bobbing her head. “I know that.”

“Good. I’m tired of waiting for the doctor. Let’s go find him.”

“Okay. I have to pee.”

• 06 •

New York City. Grand Central Station.

“The New-Soviet is losing the war,” the man on the giant screen said. “They’ve been driven back to the old Warsaw Pact lines in Central Europe. They hold only a small corner of Afghanistan, and only unimportant territories in Iran. The orbital battlefield has been static for some time, with the US and NATO holding the important orbits; the New-Soviet Orbital Army’s only advantage is its blockade of the Colony . . . ”

Charlie was standing against the wall in Grand Central Station, just below and to one side of the enormous clock over digital advertisement signs. He glanced at his watch. Three-fifty. His contact was due at four.

The crowd in the vast, hangarlike spaces of the old train station wasn’t large at this hour; but it was feverish. People walked by with single-minded haste, their paths criss-crossing in a perpetual chaotic meshing.

Opposite the clock, a big videoscreen, slightly washed out in the daylight, flashed through a series of gigantic images illustrating the remarks of the commentator. The screen was silent unless, like Charlie, you wore a headset tuned to the screen’s sponsor station, on which you’d now hear the commentator continue,
“While it is true the New-Soviets control the key shipping lanes in the Atlantic, their ‘superior’ sea power is already beginning to show its weaknesses; ships in greater numbers simply do not make up for inferior technology. War is primarily carried out through orbital drop and remote controlled ‘smart’ tech—at which the Allies excel. The great risk now is this: If the New-Soviets feel they are losing, they may assume we will take the initiative and invade Russia itself. Rather than abandon their way of life and their independence, they may attempt a nuclear first strike.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said.

“No, it’s Angelo,” Angelo said, walking up to him. “ ’Lo, Charlie, ’sap, my man.”

“Angelo! You’re the . . . ?”

“Yeah. Fuck the passwords. I forgot ’em, anyway. But it’s me. They didn’t tell you?”

“Shit, no, I thought it’d be some Pakistani in shades or something. Damn!” They clasped hands.

Charlie had known Angelo for twelve years, since they were kids. It was Angelo, four years before, who’d recruited Charlie into the NR.

Angelo was small, thin, pale, but his curly hair and eyes were dark. He had a wide mouth that split into a big, luminous grin at almost any stimulus at all. He wore an old black leather jacket and beat-up jeans, black tire-rubber boots. His eyes flashed around as if he were walking into a party and expecting to see someone he recognized. He was like that no matter where he was.

“That guy,” Charlie said, nodding toward the screen, “claims the New-Soviets have lost the war. You think so, or is that propaganda bullshit?”

Angelo looked at the screen. “Naw, that guy’s a liberal. Not one of the Administration’s flunkies. If he says they losing, they probably are.”

“He says they might panic and first-strike us.”

“Fuck it. Out of our hands. You got a tan, Charlie. You look stupid with a tan. Come on, we gotta go right to class.”

“
More
classes. About what?”

“Video animation. Digital pix. You know anything about it?”

“Programming basics.”

“This goes way, way beyond. This stuff is classified. Public doesn’t even know it exists.”

“What’s this crap about a senator?”

“Don’t talk about that in public, man. Don’t even think about it.”

“Shit! Look at that!”

Charlie pointed at the videoscreen. The program had changed. Now it showed the Arc de Triomphe, the image rocking as if it had been shot from something moving erratically toward the arch. It swelled in the screen as the camera got closer and closer.

Charlie turned up his headset and heard, “ . . . 
video obtained from an assault vehicle of some kind, possibly a Jægernaut, shortly before the destruction of the arch last month. This video would seem to refute NATO claims that the arch was destroyed in aerial bombing carried out by the New-Soviets.”

“So what about it?” Angelo asked.

“Smoke told me about that—he got it to Judy Cotz at Cableview and damn if she didn’t get it out onto the Grid! Shit, I’ll bet it gets shut down, and fast. See that, those guys on top of the arch? You can see the muzzle flashes. That’s
our guys!”

“Fuck, Charlie, keep your voice down.”

But the station was raucous with train announcements, music blaring, the perpetual rising and falling drone and drumroll of people talking and walking.

As the camera got closer to the Arc de Triomphe, a contiguous mike picked up noise generated from the arch’s top: the structured squeal of an electric guitar and the chilled-out rhythm of programmed percussion.

“Man!” Angelo said. “That’s
Rickenharp!
”

Charlie nodded. Both of them stared up at the screen, awed by the video of Rickenharp’s final minutes. As the commentator said, “These two resistance martyrs—one of them has been tentatively identified as former download-recording artist Rick Rickenharp—drew the SA’s attention to the arch in order to provide a decoy so that other important Resistance operatives could escape. Using a porta-amp, guitar, a mini-PA system, and sheer defiance, they drew not only the fire of the Second Alliance troops but the devastating attention of the Jægernaut . . . ”

They heard Rickenharp shouting over the music, “Hey, you, with the machine gun! Come on, give me your best shot!”

. . . and Rickenharp, a tiny figure up there, almost unseeable. But hearable. His voice and his guitar, kicked through those mean little Marshalls, was audible even over the gunfire. Some original tune now . . . you couldn’t make out the lyrics but you knew what it was about . . . you’d heard a thousand permutations of it. It was an anthem, and it was about being young. Maybe it should have been called
Youth
.

And then the Jægernauts rolled in from the east and west, two of them converging on the arch. They came like the neo-Fascist war machine itself. They came on like mortality. Looking from below like five-story spoked wheels, the spokes digging into whatever was in the way. There were clouds of dust, showers of smashed stone. The Arc crumbling. The neo-Fashes scattered, cheering. Yukio kept sniping at them from the shrinking top of the Arc . . . 

The echoes of his gunshots rolled like bass lines for Rickenharp’s electric wailing. Rickenharp had cranked the amps all the way up; he could be heard over the squealing of the oncoming Jægernauts . . . 

The two Jægernauts converged on the arch from opposite sides, began to grind away at it, spinning in place at first, then crunching down as the microwave beams took the fight out of the stone. Yukio’s bullets whined off the blue-metal scythes . . . metal bit down on stone with a screaming that was another kind of heavy-metal jamming with Rickenharp’s final chords: fat blue sparks shot out from the machine’s grinding spikes; cracks spread like negative lightning through the huge monument . . . the arch’s great crown bent, buckled inward . . . 

“Holy shit,” Angelo breathed as they watched the Arc de Triomphe implode into a cloud of dust, boulders bouncing, gravel raining.

A final furious and defiant guitar chord and a burst of gunfire from the arch’s top, and then the arch fell into itself—and was replaced, for a moment, by a great pillar of dust and a monolithic silence . . . 

“The sacrifice of these two men was more than a means of decoying the enemy from their friends. It was a symbolic act,”
the commentator said
. “It was their way of saying no to the SA’s unquenchable brutality . . . ”

“You hear that?” Charlie breathed. “That’s fucking
great.
”

“No way the government’s going to let ’em show that stuff again,” Angelo said.

“I don’t know. This goes out over the Internet too—someone for sure’ll hit
copy.
It’ll be distributed there for starts. Maybe if enough people saw it, they wouldn’t dare repress it . . . I mean, check it out, some of them were paying attention . . . ”

Here and there, around the station, a few of the people wearing headsets were staring up at the screen, looking into the dust cloud surrounding the wreckage of one of the wonders of the world. They’d heard Rickenharp’s final chords. How many more had heard?

Charlie and Angelo looked at each other. Till now, they’d always felt, privately, that the NR’s struggle was a hopeless one; was more of a gesture than anything else. But now, that look, that silent exchange . . . 

Hope.

FirStep: the Space Colony. Security Central.

“I’ve got to be wrong,” Russ muttered, rereading the personnel lists. “Praeger wouldn’t go that far.”

It was 8:10 a.m. Originally the Colony had gone by military time—0800, 0900—but Professor Rimpler had seen the need for “Earth homey” touches. So it was nine in the morning. And the light in the street-wide main corridors had a gray-blue tinge, like early-morning light, from six till eight. By now it was yellow. The few “cafés” still open along the Strip would be exuding the smell of eggs and bacon—though both were artificially made, artificially scented—and the vents would be pushing a brisk morning breeze along the corridors and through the shrubbery of the Open.