A Song Called Youth (79 page)

The prison infirmary was bigger than he thought it would be; danker, darker, more foul-smelling. It was shaped like an enormous Quonset hut, walls curved into ceiling. The only windows, shaped like quarter-moons lying on their straight sides, were near the ceiling; they were metal-meshed, flyspecked, never opened—probably never could. The light from the windows and the ceiling fluorescents was a sort of milky glare. There was no screen, nothing to read except the heap of printout magazines over by the door. The old metal beds creaked at one another constantly, as if groaning for the infirmary patients, and the patients—or prisoners, or victims, or stray animals—complained and cursed. Half of them were tied to the beds with plastiflex restraints; the orderlies came rarely, so the prisoners were forced to foul themselves and to lie in it.

The place was bedlam, and the shouting, the groans, the idiotic hoots and the weeping—everyone here in pain, most everyone condemned to more pain and death—the noise of the place scared Charlie. He found himself reverting to a kind of infantile state of terror, the fright only an infant can feel, a fear primordial in its depth, all-consuming. He was caught in the State’s garbage disposal; the noise of this place was constantly grinding away, and the sound of it was the sound of the gnashing steel teeth of the State, its teeth gnashing bones and flesh.

Charlie was trying to screen it all out. Think of it some other way, he told himself. Think of it as the noise of a storm.

He lay on his side with his eyes screwed shut.

His mind was busy. It cut his situation into segments, and cut the segments into smaller segments, and parsed the little segments into sorted heaps.

He could blame the Hollow Head. The place that was a drug. That’s why he was here. Because of what the Place had done to Angelo and to him.

No. It was his own weakness. His psychological original sin. His own tendency to . . . what had the school psychiatrist called it when Charlie was in seventh grade? Disassociative neuroses? The need to disassociate his mental focus from himself and things around him. Drugs worked best. It was old news: he’d done drugs because they freed him, blew away his problems and anxieties.

And the Hollow Head, of course, was more than a drug. It was living drug paraphernalia; instead of you swallowing the drug, the drug swallowed you. All-encompassing. Real disassociation, internal and external at once.

When you left the Hollow Head, you were exhausted, sick, maybe greasy with self-disgust. Vowing never to go back. Same old story, same old hard reality.

Because you always found excuses, your feet turning toward the place without your thinking about it.

When you realized you were going to cop a buzz, you argued with yourself. Maybe only so you could say to yourself, “I tried, I fought it.” But with never any real conviction in the fight.

Sure, it scared you. You’d seen the burnouts. You’d heard the stories of things happening like what had happened to Angelo. You were scared of the place, of the addiction.

Drugs, and the Hollow Head. The cycle had been eating him alive. So he’d gotten into the Resistance. He’d joined them, he knew now, more to escape from drugs than for ideological reasons. He believed in the Resistance passionately. But deep down he was there because he’d thought it would save him.

It hadn’t saved him. The drug thing was like one of those movie monsters you thought was killed—and it rises up again and again. Out of water and out of flames, neither drowned nor incinerated.

And he’d shot Angelo into himself; he’d gone mad for a while; he’d killed a cop. He was judged and convicted. The sickening thing was, he understood the conviction very well. He didn’t even have the consolation of feeling that he was an innocent wronged. He’d walked a tightrope over a vat of shit, and he’d fallen into it.

There was no appeal. He was here only till he healed up just enough to participate in the circus they’d make of his execution. Every day the doctors would examine him; treacherously, his body would repair itself, and with every improvement he was a little closer to his execution show. There were cameras in the ceiling, and the men in restraints were mostly the ones the cameras had caught mutilating themselves to put off their executions. He had a few days, as much as a week, and then they’d execute him.

The NR didn’t know where he was. It probably couldn’t help him, anyway.

He had an absurd image of his mother coming in, shouting at everyone, straightening it out, taking him away from here.
I’ll be good, Mom. Just get me out.

Shit. He didn’t even
like
his mother.

The only way out of here alive was escape.

His hand closed over the lighter again. It was sweat-glossed with his touching.

Sometimes the guards came in and searched the beds for improvised knives, drugs, anything. Fouling your bed wasn’t enough to keep them from searching it. They just made you clean it up first.

Next time they searched, they might find the lighter. Stiff as he was, now was the time.

He rolled onto his stomach, pulled the rancid sheet over his head and over the pillow, as if trying to blot out the light so he could sleep. He lay still for a while, smelling himself, sour but reassuring, in the gray semidarkness, hoping anyone watching on the ceiling cameras would think he’d fallen asleep.

Twenty minutes, till he was sweaty from being under the sheet, and then he reached under his pillow, found the lighter. He put it between the palms of his hands and began to rub it, warming it up with friction and body heat so the small amount of gas that was in it would expand, rise to the nozzle.

He pushed his head under the pillow, making a little hump under it so there was enough air for the lighter.

He decided he’d rubbed the lighter long enough. He flicked it, watched the sparks breathlessly.

There: a translucent, blue-white flame, as faint as a burnt-out freebaser’s rush, but there all the same. Enough to set the pillow on fire.

And the pillowcase caught.

He jammed the lighter into the waistband of his prison-blue pajamas and jumped up onto the bed, shouting, “SHIT! WHICH ONE OF YOU IDIOTS TOSSED THAT FUCKING BURNING BUTT ONTO MY FUCKING PILLOW? SHIT, YOU CAUGHT IT ON FIRE!” And he convulsively tossed the burning pillow one way, the burning pillowcase the other, onto the heap of magazine printouts. The torn pillow’s ticking floated in a burning cloud like moths of fire over the three beds nearest him; prisoners yelled and cringed away, others laughed, flames rose from the burning printouts, smoke darkened the room.

A Hispanic kid was spreading the fire around, laughing and setting fire to sheets, blankets.

Coughing from the flames, Charlie backed to the door, stood to one side of it, thinking, Maybe it won’t happen the way I thought it will; could be they’ll all burn to death because of me.

It didn’t matter. They were better off that way.

And there was a certain exultation seeing the flame reaching with thin yellow spires toward the ceiling; it was as if all the bound-up anger of the patients was manifested in the fire, was dancing, restoring animation to this groaning repository of the good-as-dead.

The door burst open; guards with fire extinguishers came rushing into the infirmary. No ceiling extinguishers here.

They did what he hoped: In their haste they left the door open behind them. Not thinking anyone was back there, not seeing him.

He went through the door behind them, trying not to cough till he got far enough down the hall. He went down the blank hall, looking for a way out or a place to hide. Now what? The fire hadn’t been out of hand; they’d have it out in a few minutes.

He turned a corner, came to a door. It was open. He stepped through and found he was outdoors—on the top landing of a metal stairway zigzagging down the outside of the building, four stories down into the unused concrete exercise yard below and to his left. It was gray and chilly out. Beyond the exercise yard was a high wall crested with concertina wire, cameras, and a guard tower. Charlie turned right, along the metal catwalk. Two men came out of another door, just in front of him. He saw his own face, reflected in a helmet visor. The SA was a private outfit. What was SA doing in the public police station? Were they that far infiltrated into the System?

“That’s him,” the man behind Charlie’s face said, and Charlie’s heart sank.

The other guy was a wide-shouldered, swag-bellied black guard—ironic that he should be working with the Second Alliance. He had a shotgun in his hands, its blue metal mouth open to Charlie’s middle. “You going for a walk?” the black guard said, grinning.

Charlie said, “Trying to get away from the smoke, is all.”

The SA shook his head. He had a plastic breast tag on his armored suit: SECSPEC. He was a security specialist. Highranking SA hired by the city—or by classified defense contractors, or airlines plagued by terrorists—to bring a special expertise to making security airtight. He’d seen Charlie on the cameras, known what he was doing.

“I’ve got a feeling about this young man,” the SECSPEC said, approaching, slapping his RR stick in his gloved palm, his voice all crackle-edged from the helmet amper. “He thought it out very well. We checked your DNA imprint, Charlie. Just now. You were taken in two demonstrations. Leftist demonstrations. You’re an organized rebel with a political bent.”

“Got us a terrorist, huh?” the guard said.

Charlie backed away and came to a jarring stop against the rainwater-beaded metal railing around the landing.

“I think we’re going to have to apply to the judge for an extractor order for this young gentleman,” the SECSPEC said dryly. “Unless you’d like to confess your political affiliations now, Charlie?”

Shouts and smoke from the corridor to Charlie’s right. To his left, a wall. Behind him, a four-story drop.

And ahead of him: the extractor.

Oh, no. Cold metal on his back. Concrete building. Metal catwalk. Concrete exercise yard below. Hard metal things in the hands of the men approaching him, the guard taking out a chromium pair of cuffs.

All the hard things, concrete and metal and barbed wire and guns: part of the trap. The hard-edged, hard-walled, unyielding concrete-hard trap. All the planes of metal and concrete contracting in on him, rushing toward him, bearing with them an inflexible conclusion: He had to die.

Right now.

If he let them take him, they’d use the extractor, dip into his brain, pluck his knowledge of the NR. Down to the approximate location of the HQ; the island, Merino. Smoke. Witcher.

He had a half second to make up his mind.
It’s your fault, you did the Hollow Head, risked the NR doing it, face the responsibility for once, you asshole. Do it!

“Stop him!”

He felt the gloved hand on his arm, but he wrenched away, turned, flung himself over the railing head first, angling his body vertically, throwing his legs back, hands gripping his hips; angling to fall head down, to make sure he landed on his—

The two men on the landing looked down at the body in the exercise yard. Red splash at one end of the body. “Mushed his brains out,” the guard said. “Hell, you ain’t gonna extract nothing from
that
mess.”

“God
dammit,
” the other man said; adding with a touch of admiration, “The son of a bitch beat us.”

The Island of Malta.

Claire wasn’t at all sure why she’d done it. Why she’d slept with Karakos. Why
really.

Except that perhaps it had been a way out of the pressure.

She was sitting with Lila on a little window seat, looking out to the north. It was dusk. The tangerine light reached from the west to tinge the twig tips of the trees; the trees did slow shimmies in the wind. The sky to the north was violet. The house creaked in the sighing wind.

Lila was cleaning her gun, an H&K autopistol, but doing it with placid absentmindedness, the way a woman from an earlier time would do needlepoint.

Lila stole glances at Claire now and then; Claire, wearing only a robe, a little cold but not wanting to move and break the quiet spell of the moment, pretended not to notice Lila’s glances. But she enjoyed them.

Enjoyed them as she thought about someone else entirely. Torrence. He pressured her without even trying. She wanted him, wanted his lean, hard, angular body pressed against hers. But sometimes when she looked at him, she saw one of the man-animals of her nightmare.

Karakos had finessed her with just the right amount of fatherly teasing, joking, and protectiveness; never assuming too much, but accepting the relationship as the most natural thing in the world. And he’d wept unashamedly in her presence. Wept at the horror he’d seen in the SA prisons. She’d put her arms around him, to comfort him . . . and the pieces fell into place, the chemistry took them from there.

She wondered, for a moment, if she’d fallen for what her father would have called “the oldest trick in the book.” But Karakos had seemed, like her, honestly sick of the killing. Psychically wounded.

Torrence, on the other hand, despite admitting to having been afraid, never
showed
it, and if he was hurt by what he’d seen, he kept the hurt hidden.

His reluctance to
genuinely
open up, to show her his hurt . . . it frustrated her, made her feel excluded from real intimacy with him.

Torrence’s protectiveness, too, had made her angry. Had she slept with Karakos partly out of anger?

The thought made her cringe. How had she gotten into this silly emotional maze? She looked at Lila, wishing she could be more like her. Always busy with something. Totally committed. Unruffled. Never tangled with men.

Before coming back to Earth, Claire had been celibate for two years. It was as if being on Earth (mental image of an earth goddess) had opened a hillside spring of sexuality in her.

Her only significant Colony affair, more than two years earlier, with Mouli, a Persian life-support-systems stress analyst, had discouraged her hugely. Mouli had been relentlessly cerebral, except in bed—when he became mechanical. She’d had a ferocious crush on him, though, till she realized that despite all his earnest pretense of listening to her, and despite his serious conversation about Colony politics and futurological projection, Mouli didn’t give a damn about her, the real Claire Rimpler. The mental relationship was a sham; she was just pussy to him.