A Song Called Youth (97 page)

He saw Jessie as a grid and as a holographic entity. He braced himself and the holograph came at him, an abstract tarantula of computer-generated color and line, scrambling down over him . . . and for an instant it crouched in the seat of his consciousness: Jessie. Jesus Chaco.

Jessie was a family man. He was a patriarch, a protector of his wife and six kids (six kids!) and his widowed sister’s four kids and of the poor children of his barrio. He was a muddied painting of his father, who had fled the social forest fire of Mexico’s civil war between the drug cartels and the government, spiriting his capital to Los Angeles where he’d sown it into the black market. Jessie’s father had been killed defending territory from the Russian-American mob; Jessie compromised with the mob to save his father’s business, and loathed himself for it. Wanted to kill their bosses; had to work side by side with them. Perceived his wife as a functional pet, an object of adoration who was the very apotheosis of her fixed role. To imagine her doing other than child-rearing and keeping house would be to imagine the sun become a snowball, the moon become a monkey. Jessie’s family insistently clung to the old, outdated roles.

And Jerome glimpsed Jessie’s undersides; Jesus Chaco’s self-image with its outsized penis and impossibly spreading shoulders, sitting in a perfect and shining cherry automobile, always the newest and most luxurious model, the automotive throne from which he surveyed his kingdom. Jerome saw guns emerging from the grille of the car to splash Jessie’s enemies apart with his unceasing ammunition . . . It was a Robert Williams cartoon capering at the heart of Jessie’s unconscious . . . Jessie saw himself as Jerome saw him; the electronic mirrors reflecting one another. Jessie cringed.

Jerome saw himself then, reflected back from Jessie.

He saw Jerome-X on a video screen with lousy vertical hold; wobbling, trying to arrange its pixels firmly and losing them. A figure of mewling inconsequence; a brief flow of electrons that might diverge left or right like spray from a water hose depressed with the thumb. Raised in a high-security condo village, protected by cameras and computer signals to private security thugs; raised in a media-windowed womb, with computers and vids and a thousand varieties of video games; shaped by TV and fantasy rental; sexuality imprinted by sneaking his parents’ badly hidden cache of brainsex files. And in stations from around the world, seeing the same StarFaces appear on channel after channel as the star’s fame spread like a stain across the frequency bands. Seeing the Star’s World Self crystallizing; the media figure coming into definition against the backdrop of media competition, becoming real in this electronic collective unconscious.

Becoming real, himself, in his own mind, simply because he’d appeared on a few thousand screens, through video tagging, transer graffiti. Growing up with a sense that media events were real and personal events were not. Anything that didn’t happen on the Grid didn’t happen. Even as he hated conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants, still the Grid and TV and vids defined his sense of personal unreality; and left him unfinished.

Jerome saw Jerome: perceiving himself unreal. Jerome: scanning a transer, creating a presence via video graffiti. Thinking he was doing it for reasons of radical statement. Seeing, now, that he was doing it to make himself feel substantial, to superimpose himself on the Media Grid . . . 

And then Eddie’s link was there, Eddie’s computer model sliding down over Jerome like a mudslide. Eddie seeing himself as a Legendary Wanderer, a rebel, a homemade mystic; his fantasy parting to reveal an anal-expulsive sociopath; a whiner perpetually scanning for someone to blame for his sour luck.

Suddenly Bones tumbled into the link; a complex worldview that was a sort of streetside sociobiology, mitigated by a loyalty to friends, a mystical faith in brain chips and amphetamines. His underside a masochistic dwarf, the troll of self-doubt, lacerating itself with guilt.

And then Swish, a woman with an unsightly growth, errant glands that were like tumors in her, something other people called ‘testicles.’ Perpetually hungry for the means to dampen the pain of an infinite self-derision that mimicked her father’s utter rejection of her. A mystical faith in synthetic morphine.

. . . Jerome mentally reeling with disorientation, seeing the others as a network of distorted self-images, caricatures of grotesque ambitions. Beyond them he glimpsed another realm through a break in the psychic clouds: the Plateau, the whispering plane of brain chips linked on forbidden frequencies, an electronic haven for doing deals unseen by cops; a Plateau prowled only by the exquisitely ruthless; a vista of enormous challenges and inconceivable risks and always the potential for getting lost, for madness. A place roamed by the wolves of wetware.

There was a siren quiver from that place, a soundless howling, pulling at them . . . drawing them in . . . 

“
Uh-uh,
wolflost, pross,” Bones said, maybe aloud or maybe through the chips. Translated from chip shorthand, those two syllables meant. “Stay away from the Plateau, or we get sucked into it, we lose our focus. Concentrate on parallel processing function.”

Jerome looked behind his eyelids, sorted through the files. He moved the cursor down . . . 

Suddenly, it was there. The group-thinking capacity looming above them, a sentient skyscraper. They all felt a rush of megalomaniacal pleasure in identifying with it; with a towering edifice of Mind. Five chips became One.

They were ready. Jessie transmitted the bait.

Alerted to an illegal use of implant chips, the trashcan was squeaking down the hall, scanning to precisely locate the source. It came to a sudden stop, rocking on its wheels in front of their cell. Jessie reached through the bars and touched its input jack.

The machine froze with a
clack
midway through a turn, and hummed as it processed what they fed it. Would the robot bite?

Bones had a program for the Cyberguard Fourteens, with all the protocol and a range of sample entry codes. Parallel processing from samples took less than two seconds to decrypt the trashcan’s access code. Then—

They were in. The hard part was the reprogramming.

Jerome found the way. He told the trashcan that he wasn’t Eric Wexler, because the DNA code was all wrong, if you looked close enough; what we have here is a case of mistaken identity.

Since this information
seemed
to be coming from authorized sources—the decrypted access code made them authorized—the trashcan fell for the gag and opened the cage.

The trashcan took the five Eric Wexlers down the hall—that was Jessie’s doing, showing them how to make it think of five as one, something his people had learned from the immigration computers. It escorted them through the plastiflex door, through the steel door, and into Receiving. The human guard was heaping sugar into his antique Ronald McDonald coffee mug and watching
The Mutilated
on his wallet TV. Bones and Jessie were in the room and moving in on him before he broke free of the television and went for the button. Bones’s long left arm spiked out and his stiffened fingers hit a nerve cluster below the guy’s left ear, and he went down, the sugar dispenser in one hand swishing a white fan onto the floor.

Jerome’s chip had cross-referenced Bones’s attack style. Bones was trained by commandos, the chip said. Military elite. Was he a plant? Bones smiled at him and tilted his head, which Jerome’s chip read as:
No. I’m trained by the Underground. Radics.

Jessie was at the console, deactivating the trashcan, killing the cameras, opening the outer doors. Jessie and Swish led the way out, Swish whining softly and biting her lip. There were two more guards at the gate, one of them asleep. Jessie had taken the gun from the guy Bones had put under, so the first guard at the gate was dead before he could hit an alarm. The catnapping guy woke and yelled with hoarse terror, and then Jessie shot him in the throat.

Watching the guard fall, spinning, blood making its own slow-motion spiral in the air, Jerome felt a perfect mingling of sickness, fear and self-disgust. The guard was young, wearing a cheap wedding ring, probably had a young family. So Jerome stepped over the dying man and made an adjustment; used his chip, chilled himself out with adrenaline. Had to—he was committed now. And he knew with a bland certainty that they had reached the Plateau after all.

He would live on the Plateau now. He belonged there, now that he was one of the wolves.

Paris, France.

At the broken heart of Paris is the Île de la Cité, an island in the River Seine. On the easternmost tip of the island is a memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazi occupation. The current government did not keep it in good repair. The Cathedral of Notre Dame on another tip of the island was also in ill repair, as the Unity Party had no great liking for the Catholic Church, which did not support its racist agenda, and blocked the Vatican’s access with a thousand bureaucratic obstacles. North of Notre Dame lay the ruins of old buildings in the Rue Chanoinesse, the Rue Chantres, and the Rue des Ursins. On the Rue des Ursins was a war-damaged police station, a
gendarmerie,
long since abandoned. Though not thirty yards from it was an official rationing station, where, every day, the disenfranchised lined up, sometimes for days, to receive pathetically inadequate government rations of freeze-dried and canned goods and petrosynthetics. Groups from a mere cluster to a crowd could be expected here at any time, so it was good cover for the New Resistance. An NR operative approached the rationing center as if he were part of the crowd waiting for a handout; simply entered the ruined building next door, as if to find a spot for a quick pee. He passed through several woebegone, debris-cluttered rooms, and then into an alley, blocked at both ends. Here was a boarded-over back door to the erstwhile police station. The door swung aside if pulled just right. And if the NR operative made the appropriate hand signal as he entered, the guard wouldn’t blow his brains out.

Best to be updated on the hand signals.

If you make it past the guard, you go down a clean but unheated drab-blue hallway to a metal door opening on a row of cells. If you said the right words at the metal door, the guard behind it wouldn’t blow your brains out, either.

Instead, she’ll slide the door open for you, and you’ll go to the cell where your debriefing takes place.

• • •

Steinfeld, Pasolini, Dan Torrence, and Levassier sat around an old Formica table in a chilly metal room, formerly a big holding tank used mostly for drunks. There was a sat-link terminal in the corner, gathering dust, because they didn’t have a secure way to use it just now, and there was a plastic flagon of hot coffee on the table. There were rifles stacked against the wall. There was the smell of dust and sewage: the toilets didn’t flush. Sewage had to be carted out in buckets.

Torrence was sitting on a wooden bench that rocked on its uneven legs whenever he shifted his weight. His hands clasped the tin coffee mug for warmth.

He felt like shit.

“Danco is dead, Cordenne is dead,” Torrence said, “and that’s bad. But I’ll tell you what’s worse. Six civilians were injured, three are dead.” He turned to stare at Lina Pasolini. “And the fucking Fascists have a major propaganda victory. We go from being freedom fighters to being terrorists.”

Lina Pasolini was dark, her black hair cut short, her thick eyebrows two bars of black emphasis over her hooded eyes. Her face was carved out of deep shadows and strong planes, a handsome face that hid its sensuality under a burden of quiet suspicion. She wore khaki trousers, sneakers, a grimy sweatshirt. There was a .44 stuck in the waistband of her pants. She didn’t need it here.

She lit a stubby Russian cigarette and looked at it, caught like a pointer between her thumb and forefinger, as she spoke in her careful, trained English. “Showing they have the will to kill anyone necessary has worked for many guerilla groups. The crowd was in support of the fascists . . . And—you know—bad propaganda can be good propaganda if it is followed up, redirected.” She’d grown up in Sardinia, but she had a master’s in international poli-sci from Columbia, and more than once Torrence had heard her speak of having lit a cigarette with the burning diploma.

Torrence thought she was dangerously certain of herself and, worse, unbearably pretentious. And as if to confirm that, she went on:

“Terror is the only statement that, once heard, is never forgotten.” Her voice was deep but without much inflection; her Italian accent was almost imperceptible. Torrence thought of Italians as noisy and assertive. But Pasolini was always laidback, maddeningly calm, methodical. As if she was absolutely certain that everything she said was inarguable fact.

“You’re saying you did it on purpose?” Torrence asked. “You meant to kill civilians?”

“Not precisely—there were fascists after me, I was trying to kill them. But if it happens that we sacrifice so-called civilians—if there is such a thing—it becomes part of our statement. A declaration of commitment, you see.” She gave him a gauzy look from somewhere deep inside herself. “There really are no civilians, ‘Hard-Eyes.’ ” A little mockery in the use of his long-discarded
nom de guerre.
“Everyone must be in this war, children and adults, women and men, and if I knew how to bring their dogs and cats in, I’d do that too.”

Torrence looked at Steinfeld, who was combing his graying beard distractedly with the blunt fingers of one work-grimy hand, shifting his heavy bulk in his chair. His curly black hair had grown shapeless, was streaked with white. His black eyes were sunken; his face had been round, was sagging to jowly. He had been working, that afternoon, on one of their old FRG Army trucks, in frayed grease-spotted overalls and a yellowed T-shirt. His Mossad-issue Damazi machine rifle leaned against the wall.

Steinfeld said at last, “I understand your thinking, Lina. War is not simple. But the New Resistance has a policy. The policy sustains our ability to work together despite differing political backgrounds.” He almost never used the term “New Resistance”; usually he’d say, “We.” His use of it meant this was some sort of official ruling. “The policy makes a strict distinction between civilians and our enemy. We do not kill non-combatants.”