A Song Called Youth (105 page)

Bones’s offer had seemed like serendipity. Join the Resistance. Travel, meet interesting people, all expenses paid; try not to get yourself tortured and murdered by Fascists. Okay, there were drawbacks, the likelihood of getting killed was one of them, but . . . 

But it had seemed like just what the doctor ordered then. Now it seemed like a trap.

He felt their hands on his brain in some sense, molding him. He felt himself molded into a tool for their political imperatives.

Maybe all that was just the perception of a man with cabin fever, he thought. Too many days in this room. Staring at the bare cinder-block walls, or into the headache-maker—the holustrator. Watching Bettina thunder back and forth, her enormous breasts tweaking his libido while her thick, collapsing ankles made him wince. But then, he’d always had this weird
thing
for, ah, heavyset girls . . . 

Stop evaluating the woman on those levels, Jerome. Take another deep breath and give it a chance. Bones was a right guy . . . 

Bettina was saying, “ . . . and Jerome, you focus on yo’ factor and work wid Alouette.”

Jerome-X sighed.

Bettina paused, turned to him. “You got a problem with dat, honey?”

“Uh-no.” But he did. The little girl, Alouette, was smart, some kind of genius and a natural with this stuff. But he knew her; she’d run off into playing with cellular automata and leave him holding the processing bag. He glanced at her and saw her pouting. Little kids don’t hide that stuff. “No, she’s good, but . . . ”

“She good but what?” Bettina asked. “Hell, she faster on de uptake den you are.”

“It’s just that . . . ” He glanced at Alouette. The little black girl, sitting with her feet dangling, looked as if she was going to cry. She was too damn young for this. How could they do this to her?

Most of the time, though, she loved working with chips. She seemed happy, except that she missed her dad. The one they called Smoke . . . 

She was happier here than Jerome was. “It’s just that I’m burnt out, is what it is,” Jerome burst out. “I need a fucking break—” He glanced apologetically at the little girl. “I need to get out of here. I mean, for a day or—or something.”

Bettina checked the time blinking in a corner of the holustrator. “Shit. Dat’s it for today.” She tapped the foot switch with a toe, and the shimmering globe vanished. “We do dis set in de morning. I guess it time to break out de recreation. We got a video to show, and you can each hab two Tecates. Except Alouette.”

Alouette’s pout deepened. “I can’t see the video and drink beer?”

“No. You can hab a Dr Pepper. And you can get on de bus.” Bettina grinned at her. “Mario’s going take you to de Tijuana Sheraton to see a man.”

“Smoke! It’s Smoke!” The little girl flashed a smile like sun-washed seashells. “Can I take Richard?”

“Yeah, sho, what I care you take de crow.”

Alouette made an excited motion with her hands, as if she were patting down invisible dough. And then she sprinted through the door. .

There goes one of my classmates, Jerome thought. Gnarly.

“Go on now, alla you,” Bettina said.

Gratefully, Jerome got out of his desk, stretching. The others moved toward the door and he started to follow.

“Not you, Mr. Burnout,” Bettina said, blocking Jerome’s way. “I wanna talk to you.”

He groaned inwardly.
Another ideological pep talk.
As the last of the other NR students filtered out of the room—Bones glancing back with a funny, rueful expression on his face—Jerome said, “Hey, Bettina, I know what you’re going to say. I hear it every night from Bones. I got to either get my motivation together or get out.”

Bones closed the door behind him. Jerome was alone with Bettina.

“You got to get some shit in perspective.” She put her hands on her hips and took a step toward him. Like the rolling of a great soft wave, coming toward the beach. “You tired of twelve-hour days, workin’ every day, little holustrator headaches? You going to go up against a cybernetic mind got a computing capacity dat compares to you like Einstein to a Chihuahua. You wanta hack into de SA’s computers, some of de mos’ sophis’icated around, you got to be committed to
work.”

“I know that, I just—”

“Besides which, who de hell
you
to complain?” She took another step toward him. He could smell her. Salty, meaty, sweaty, and female. Not unpleasant really, if a bit overwhelming. “Dere’s thousands of people under de fucking jackboot in Europe, women and children, sufferin’, starvin’. Dyin’.” She shook her head, came closer. He moved back.

“I wasn’t complaining. I was . . . well, making a suggestion, like. This is creative work. I do better creative work if I get a little, I don’t know, R and R and maybe some, uh . . . ”

She took another step toward him. He stepped back, looking into her big brown eyes. Trying not to think about her big brown . . . 

He swallowed.

“Maybe some what?” she said. “Some
pussy?”

“Uh . . . ”

“You think I don’t see you watching me?”

“Well, I . . . ”

She had him pressed against the wall now; she radiated heat: she was a pliant, dusky sun; her great, barely confined breasts were puddles of sensation on his chest. They seemed to suck at him. He could almost feel the gravitational pull of her mass: a delirious heaviness. He felt a rustling at his crotch; his erection, bent like a bean sprout in his pants, struggling to reach her nurturing warmth.

“Come here, skinny little white boy.”

She enfolded him then, and a few moments later there was the sound of paper ripping.

Kauai, Hawaii.

How long have they been with me now, Witcher asked himself, looking at Marion and Aria and Jeanne. Three years? Four? Something like that. He was becoming dependent on them. As he got older, he found it harder and harder when he had to go away from them. They were a tonic, as his father would have said.

Pretty girls pretty girls pretty girls with guns.
Arrange them in the room like flowers in a vase.

They were in his bedroom at nine o’clock on a sunny, crystalline Hawaiian morning. They’d all slept in the bedroom, Witcher on his single bed with its lacquered mahogany backboard, the girls on the big, very big, round bed across from his. Where he could see them, if he woke in the night.

One wall, curtained with white silk now, was a mirror. The other held Witcher’s professional awards, citations and certificates, framed and mounted. He hadn’t received one in years, had become too reclusive for the bonhomie of the business world. Another wall held the doors to the walk-in closet, with the girls’ vanities lined up in them, their video mirrors, and the Jacuzzi.

The seafront side of the room was all silver-curtained glass doors; the doors were closed, but from somewhere he could smell the sea breeze.

Sometimes he felt a little guilty, in his comfort. But his foresight had made it possible. The western world was mired in war, the residue of war, and poverty; he had invested in the East. His money was all about China and SE Asia.

Aria was doing her calisthenics, wearing only her bikini panties. The tall, Amazonian fullness of her; the ripple of her exaggerated extreme-body-builder muscles; the Swedish gold of her hair, her skin. The gold-plated Walther autopistol strapped to her thigh put an edge on her erotic appeal. Those jiggling golden breasts; those deeply set jade-green eyes . . . 

He was pleased she hadn’t taken off the weapon before doing her exercise. She knew he liked to see it shine beside the other shininess of her perspiration. (He did hope, though, that she showered soon. She also knew he disliked anyone getting their bodily effluents on the furniture.)

And Jeanne. Lying on the bed, on her tummy, nude but for the prescription dark-blue sunglasses, reading Bataille’s
Historie de l’Oeil.
Small, this creature, small-breasted and only five two, but full-hipped, softly dimpled all around. Straight, Cleopatra-cut raven hair, bangs over her tinted glasses like the fringe in a funeral limo’s window. She knew he sometimes liked to see her wearing only the blue glasses.

And her skin. He never tired of it. Alabaster, touched with rose pink here and there. Her black hardened-plastic carbine—plastic but quite real, quite lethal—leaning against the bed, within reach. Jeanne.

And Marion. Watching a rock TV show without the sound on. As usual. Half Puerto Rican. Short and busty. Heavy kohl on her brown-black eyes. Two little rings in one nostril, gold wire stitched up and down the edges of her ears. Short auburn hair, spiky, each spike tipped with a different color. Made him nostalgic for the college-circuit punk shows he’d gone to in his early twenties. Long time ago. All that shared and hopeless anger . . . Marion wearing a black neoprene bikini—amazing that she could sleep comfortably in that thing—and a black lace brassiere. You could see nipples through it the color of dried blood. Spike heels that looked as if they’d been carved of volcanic glass. Black painted finger- and toenails. She was, culturally if unconsciously, a part of her own little demographic tribe. Her submachine gun, one of those transparent jobs that showed off its bullets, lying across her knees, under her hands. Her hands reposing like black-beaked doves on it.

Sometimes he thought:
Maybe I should do it. Actually make love to them. Physically do it. Maybe they’re disappointed I never actually do it. That I just like to have them there to look at, play with, pet a little.

Probably not. They were hired escort-bodyguards, expensive ones; courtesans who could fight and shoot. They were his own secret service and, in an austere way, his companions. They were professionals, and to them it would be just more work if he wanted to actually have sex with them.

He was
having sex with them, after his fashion. Just watching them move about. Knowing that he
could
fuck them if he wanted to. They were available. Profoundly available. They were there for him, eternally waiting. Sometimes he made them strike poses. Spread their legs, torquing this way and that. Jut their bosoms, tease him with their expressions. Sometimes he put his face close to them, so close he could feel the body heat of the girl on his lips. Sometimes he’d put on the freshly laundered silk gloves and pet them a little. He’d order them to make love to one another; combine and recombine them as he watched from a chair by the bed. They were all bisexual. And he paid them breathtakingly well.

So they didn’t mind if he chose their clothing and their unclothing; their perfume and their bath soap; their makeup and their cold creams. Their lingerie and their weapons.

He was convinced that if he actually had sex with them, it would be a let-down. Any one of them, he didn’t doubt, was quite proficient. But the act itself had always been a disappointment to him. The excellence, the exquisite essence of sex, for Witcher, was in the contemplation of it. The anticipation. The almost. The allure.
That
was the high. His refinement of voyeurism was an esthetic achievement, really, an art form that he was proud of. Was he making them into objects? Sex objects? Partly. Making them into art objects, more truly, with his mind the gallery for his art. That’s how he felt about it. Arranging them around him like the parts of a living erotic collage.

But sometimes . . . he felt oppressed by their mocking nearness; near and yet far. Their availability and tenderness—but underneath it, they always maintained an emotional distance.

How could he expect anything else?

He couldn’t. And sometimes that depressed him.

It helped to get away from them for a while when he felt that way. As he was beginning to, now.

“I’m going to have breakfast in the main office,” he said. “Need to talk to old Lockett. He gets flustered when he sees you. You want your breakfast on the balcony?”

“Yes, please.” Jeanne didn’t took up from her book.

“Thanks, Dad,” Aria said, as she did her t’ai chi.

“That’s be great, Dad.” Marion absently reached over, toyed with Jeanne’s ass.

They called him Dad, and he encouraged it. He wasn’t sure why.

“I’ll have it sent down. Then take a patrol around, check out the grounds, will you?”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

“You got it, Dad.”

“We got it covered, Dad.”

Witcher’s isolated beachfront estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai was watched over by a dizzying variety of reconnaissance devices; by satellites and motion-assessment cyber-eyes; by vibration sensors and overflight recon birds; by a variety of cameras and human guards. Aria, Jeanne, and Marion were just three of fourteen bodyguards.

But it was Witcher who saw the thing first, just looking out his window.

“It can’t go on,” Witcher’s accountant was telling him, shortly before Witcher saw it. “It simply can’t go on!” Mincing through the sentence. Lockett—who was on a video display, his image sat-shot from New York—pursed his lips in his prissy way, and as usual Witcher thought of Lockett’s closing lips as the shutting of a clutch purse. “Your capital outlay is just not matched in the—”

“There are other issues here besides financial convenience,” Witcher said. He was standing at his breakfast bar, picking at the remains of his morning’s organically grown fruit salad, gazing absently out the window as he talked to Lockett. The sea was restless today. Thin clouds skied ahead of the wind, and below the clouds a single aircraft flecked the azure. “The NR is an important step in the direction that I . . . ”

Witcher’s voice trailed off.

The aircraft had birthed something out of itself. It was too far away to make it out clearly. But it was growing . . . 

“Jesus!”

He ran for the hurricane cellar.

“Now, look . . . ” Lockett was saying from the monitor behind him. “You can’t pretend it’s going to go away . . . this kind of debt . . . ”

The voice diminishing, lost as Witcher half dove, half ran down the steps—then grabbed at the railing as the world roared and the building rocked around him.

A missile. He couldn’t believe it. How dare they.