A Song Called Youth (106 page)

He watched a crack make its way across the concrete basement wall ever so slowly.
Crick. Crick-crick.
He waited for the building to come down around him.

But the crack stopped spreading; the building quieted down. Whatever was left of it was going to stand.

Slowly, on wobbly legs, he climbed the stairs, into smoke and shouting, flickering light. A few shards of glass tinkled from the crust remaining in the frame of the picture window. Flame licked down the hallway; gray smoke collected under the cracked ceiling. The monitors were blacked out; two of them cracked, one caved in.

Maynard, his new chief of Security, a whip-thin black man in a sky-blue jumpsuit, came in wearing a gas mask but coughing underneath it. Witcher felt his spine freeze, and asked, “Did they nerve-gas us?”

Maynard shook his head. “No, I’m wearin’ the mask against smoke.” He pulled it off, and his face was sheathed in blood from a cut on his forehead. He was gasping, leaning against the tilted breakfast bar. “You okay, Mr. Witcher?” When Witcher nodded, Maynard went on. “There were two more missiles, but we got those, they went down in the ocean. The one that got through hit the sun veranda, took out the whole south wing. The aircraft is gone. We didn’t get a clear make on it. We’d better get you out of here.”

“You’d better run a check for antigens, especially viral agents.”

Maynard looked around nervously. “Germ warfare?”

“Chances are slim, but check.” They wouldn’t have used one of the viruses; they wouldn’t want to tip anyone off about them. They didn’t know the New Resistance was aware of their viral program; and they didn’t know about Witcher’s contact in their lab. At least, last he knew they didn’t . . . 

Witcher had to wet his mouth, working up saliva, before he could talk. “Anybody hurt?”

“Your whole kitchen staff. Most of them dead.”

Witcher shook his head impatiently. “I mean
the girls.
”

“They’re okay, they were out on the grounds, on the other side. They’re checking the fences now.”

“Okay. Get on the fone in the limo, get some paramedics out here, then get the chopper warmed up. We’ll risk the sky. I want out of here fast.”

“Where to?”

Witcher hesitated. The Second Alliance was behind the attack, of course. They had decided to take the offensive. They were tired of playing with his intermediaries. His funding was the lifeblood of the resistance. They were trying to slash the artery.

He had to get way out of range.

“Book me on a shuttle to FirStep. ”

Maynard blinked. “The Space Colony? Seriously?”

“Seriously. Have the girls go to my suite in The Waikiki till I send for them. Tell Russ Parker I’m coming out. And get yourself bandaged up. See a doctor when he comes.”

Maynard turned to go.

Witcher called after him. “Maynard—make that shuttle ticket a one-way.”

Just west of London, England. Lab Six.

It had taken Barrabas all morning and half the afternoon to get clearance for Lab Six. Interrogation, extractor mind searches, more psych profiles, sheer bureaucratic suspicion. He was afraid they might have stumbled onto his misgivings about the Second Alliance, his dislike of the boy Jebediah, and his mistrust of their reverence for aristocracy. But they hadn’t followed up the right chains of associations, it looked like, because here he was at last, walking into Lab Six with the albino.

“It’s such a relief to be back in England after Paris,” Cooper was saying. “You can’t get a proper biscuit there, and they have no understanding of heated housing.”

“Oh, yes?” Barrabas said, thinking he was expected to say something. He was tired from all the interrogation, from trying to defend himself without being defensive. It was like balancing on a narrow tree limb in a wind.

Both men were wearing white lab jumpsuits. They walked down a hallway done in dull-green tile and soft lights, with a temperature so exactingly controlled you never felt even a fractional change in temperature from the mean. Cooper, with his one pink eye and one blue eye, his dead-white skin and wispy thatch of white hair, had startled Barrabas when he’d first seen him. Naturally Barrabas had tried to conceal that reaction.

“I understand that you, ah, were slated for another kind of work for the Alliance,” Cooper said, superficially apologetic. “But the war, you see, has created a shortage of available technicians. We have to make do . . . ”

Make do? Insulting, that was. But Barrabas shrugged it off as Cooper unlocked the double locks of the editing room.

“All this security is so tiresome,” Cooper said. “It really is an impediment, don’t you know.”

Digital editing equipment, white plastic consoles, and chromium interfaces filled most of the small editing room. A wall-size video screen stood beyond it. “Here’s your workstation,” Cooper was saying. “If some of the equipment is unfamiliar, we’ll try to get hold of the appropriate manuals.”

“I know the main unit here, but this other stuff . . . ” Barrabas shook his head. “It’s like I tried to tell them, I had a year of video tech voccie and I worked about two weeks at VidEx before they went belly-up. I’m not real experience—”

“Oh, we’ll soon get you up to form. I’ve been doing some amateur editing myself, and I can operate the main unit. Some of the other stuff is a bit, ah, arcane . . . ” He activated the machinery as he spoke, tapped rewind. “I was just going over the recordings when they called and said you were here, so we’ve got wizard timing, anyhow. We’re really not supposed to leave this material in the machines when we’re out of the room, but I locked it up and, ah, I only popped out for a few minutes. I doubt we’ve been infiltrated by spies in the last five minutes, eh? But Klaus and Colonel Watson aren’t much interested in common sense . . . Ah, here we are.”

He hit the play button and the screen rezzed up a slightly blurry image of the detention pens in the experimental center near Lyon. It was a down angle on three pens of wretched-looking prisoners, divided up along racial lines. Brown, black, white. “I suppose you’ve been briefed?” Cooper asked. “As to my, ah, work, I mean.”

“Well, no, not really. That is, a little. Psychological warfare against mongrel terrorists, they said.”

“Yes, ah, something along those lines. Amongst other things. I’m a social geneticist, you see. In this experiment we’re attempting to prove that racism is instinctive—not so we can tell the world, but so we can activate the instinct where needed and bring people around to our, ah,
cause,
don’t you know. Here we used increased survival-stress factors to promote racism between the three groups . . . I enjoy using the fast forward here.” He chuckled. “Watch.” He hit the button, and the video fast forwarded through several days of prisoner millings and interaction, so that the figures, seen from above, surged around and betwixt one another like beans in boiling water; whirling together, bouncing apart, a feverish human Brownian motion. “If you watch closely, you can see the pattern superseding over time, a kind of rhythmic surge, back and forth, between the pens, as they move in slow waves of aggression that gradually build up till we remove the barriers and they come together in Secondary Aggression—an outbreak of violence.” He slowed the images down so they could see the detainees in combat, race against race, maiming one another with teeth and fists and feet.

Barrabas’s stomach lurched.
Be a man,
he told himself.

“Of course,” Cooper went on, “these racist instincts are usually well under control in most people—it’s possible to condition them out entirely. And some people are resistant to them—they may lack that particular behavioral gene. You can see some of them hanging back.”

“What’s my part in all this?” Barrabas asked.

“You’ll be editing this recording with me, and some others, for presentation to the Inner Council. And to certain select individuals. Also, you’ll be helping me review video—we have some prisoners we regard as salvageable, if they’re racially appropriate. We check through the vid for the right bone matrices, the other indicators. A winnowing process, don’t you know . . . ” He was switching feeds, going to another vid.

Barrabas watched with mounting discomfort as Cooper showed him studies of “degenerative behavior in Detention Center prisoners”; the “degrees of resistance and the submission points, in reference and contrast” as Jewish and black and Oriental and homosexual prisoners were tortured (one of those made him gag, something Cooper ignored—Cooper understood the need for workplace acclimatization) using techniques developed by the CIA and perfected by Chilean and Guatemalan secret police; experiments in “efficiency-execution of prisoners”; nerve-gas tests on prisoners; experiments in mind control on children separated from their parents under enhanced-trauma conditions and “undergoing behavioral reprogramming with negative/positive stimulus.” And then the last recording . . . of the squirming pink things.

“Blimey!” Barrabas burst out. Backsliding to old speech mannerisms in his shock. “What the bloody ’ell!”

Cooper was shaken himself, for, a different reason. “Not supposed to be on here. You weren’t supposed to . . . ” His finger hovered over the off button. But then he shrugged and drew his hand back. “Well, you’ve, ah, seen them. You’ll have to see them eventually anyway, although we’d planned to do some further extractor work with you—we can always erase your memories later, I suppose.”

On the screen were half a dozen semi-human creatures. Squirming, wheezing, hairless pink things, rather like shaven puppies standing on their hind legs. But with flattened, slightly warped human features. They had hands too big for their arms, double-length fingers, receding foreheads—the skulls of chimps behind human faces—and shrunken human genitals. No nipples. They were a bit bigger than German shepherd puppies. As Barrabas watched, one of them defecated on itself, then scooped the stuff up in its fingers and smeared it on another creature’s back in a spiral pattern . . . 

“These are our darling little subhumans,” Cooper was saying. “S-Human 6. Our sixth generation. I call them Puppies. People Puppies. They
are
rather like puppies, aren’t they?”

“What are they?”

“The work force of the future. Or, anyway, an early model of it. A prototype. They’re genetically engineered for certain characteristics . . . We’ve not got all the kinks out of the old DNA spiral, as you can see, but we’re working on it, coming along nicely. These are rather stunted, it’s true. Once the mongrel races and the otherbloods are eliminated, these subhumans will be needed to fill a certain, ah, economic niche. In a way they’re idiot savants—they’re animal-stupid on one level, bred to be entirely obedient, but on another they’re capable of being trained to do some kinds of skilled labor, like bricklaying, assembly-line work, plastic molding, garbage reclamation, even electrical work. They’re too mentally handicapped and passive to ever cause us any trouble. They can understand language up to a point, enough to take orders—but they can’t
use
language. They’re almost living robots. These, now, are rather stunted. They tend to die young, and they have faulty lungs, but they have a good attention span for instructions when they’re motivated with an electric prod. By the seventh or eighth generation—available in about three years, we hope—the subhumans will be workable. And one day the world will be divided between the Ideal Race and the Subhumans. There will be no other races. And this lot will never be capable of rebellion—not a bit. They’re marvelous, really, don’t you think?” Cooper turned to look at him.

Barrabas marshaled all his self-control and parrotted, in a rasp, “Marvelous.” He cleared his throat. “Um—will I be . . . working with them . . . in person?”

“Oh, but of course!” Cooper said cheerily, hitting the fast forward button. “Now that you’ve seen them.” The squirming pink things scurried around their filthy little pen like hyperactive maggots on legs.

Barrabas stared at the screen and took deep breaths, and after a while thought,
Okay. I can go through with this.

But deep down, he wasn’t so sure.

FirStep, the Space Colony. Interplanetary space.

From the outside, the six-mile-long Colony looked like a cylinder that had swallowed something too big to digest
 . . . 
The bulge at its middle was a Bernal sphere, itself a mile and a half in diameter. The concave interior of the sphere was to have been the main inhabitable area of the Colony. It was Pellucidar, the Hollow Earth: the landscape stretched away to an inside-out horizon, curving up when it should have curved down. The colony’s cylinder was pointed toward the sun, and reflected sunlight glowed from filtered, circular windows at the sunward end
 . . . 
The colony rotated once every five minutes, creating a subtle centrifugal artificial gravity for the thousands of people who lived in it, working at refining ore brought from the asteroids; working in the lowgrav areas on lowgrav specialty products; working on finishing the floating city in space—though it was a vast artifact designed to be never quite finished
 . . . 

Claire Rimpler knew that something was wrong with Witcher when she shook hands with him. She could feel the telltale rubberiness of a sheath on his hand: a sort of condom for the hand, much tighter than gloves, nearly invisible, difficult to feel. And even with the sheath, he drew his hand back faster than was quite civil.

They stood in the Colony Administration conference room, beside a wall-size videoscreen and a table shaped like a backward S, making small talk as they waited for Russ Parker—actually, they were sizing one another up.

Witcher looked about forty, but he was much older; he had the slightly glossy look of a man who used cosmetic surgeons and glandularists, enzymologists, RNA retoolers to slow the aging process. He’d allowed a little silver into his long, neatly clipped brown hair and his small, geometrically perfect beard. He was a compact man in what looked like an astronomically expensive tailored suit of soft maroon leather.

Claire Rimpler was not quite diminutive, but nearly; she had, large, hazel eyes, short auburn hair, lips a little too large for her doll-like face. It was an appearance that might have made her seem a soft person, someone of negligible force—but she came across as the opposite.
What
I heard was, she’s no kill-virgin,
someone had said when she’d come back to the Colony to take over the administrative reins; she had killed, and seen killing, seen enough to fill the lives of three generals, in the service of the New Resistance; her father, who had designed and run the Space Colony, had been first murdered and then cerebrally violated, portions of his brain used to interface with a colony computer, until the disastrous consequences.