A Song Called Youth (107 page)

Claire had left her lover, according to Witcher’s files on her—an NR operative whom Witcher knew slightly, Dan Torrence—left him back on Earth, to come here and take charge. And she was smart as a whip.

And much of that hard past, that lethal competency, was subtly present in her body language and her expression.

But when she smiled, you heard wind chimes.

She smiled at Witcher now and said, “It must be a comedown, your quarters, after what you’re used to. When Russ came back from your place on Kauai, he had palm trees in his eyes.”

“It’s kind of comforting here, actually, the smaller rooms,” Witcher said. “After someone has fired a missile at your house, you want to go to ground.” Adding distractedly, “And I’m close in where the gravity is light; it’s refreshing.” He was looking at the door as Russ Parker came in. Behind Russ came Lester and Stoner and Chu.

I was right about Witcher,
Claire thought, watching him. The man was some variation of paranoid. It was like sitting with your back to the wall, being here, for Witcher.
He doesn’t know how fragile the place really is . . . 

Russ Parker was a stocky, red-faced middle-aged guy wearing real blue jeans and a blue printout shirt. It was gauche, supposedly, to mix printout and cloth clothing, but it was like Russ to be oblivious to that.

Lester, the technicki rep, sat at the table with Stoner and Chu, talking softly. He was a large man, black as the space between stars, wearing a comm tech’s gray zippered jumpsuit. His wife, Kitty, was a nondescript white woman who turned out to have enormous wellsprings of character. Chu, the brisk, intense Chinese woman who was now administrative secretary, was an NR organizer who had found out that Kitty was Dan’s sister: Dan Torrence’s
sister!
The coincidence was a little eerie. But maybe not so strange, really. In her way, Kitty was a fighter. She had fought for Lester. She had fought for her baby. She had fought for Russ Parker’s conscience, and she’d won it.

And Dan, as of a few weeks now, was an uncle. She’d have to get word to him somehow, she reflected, as they all sat down. Dan needed cheering up. But it was hard to get word into Paris. There was a Mossad line of communication that could be used sometimes. Witcher could set it up for her perhaps.

Claire ached to talk to Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence. Every morning, charging into her workday, she told herself she should forget him, let her feelings for him die on the vine. He was a guerrilla in a hotbed of fascism. It was like being an active resistance partisan in Hitler’s Berlin. His chances for survival—especially with extractors around to help ferret him out—were microscopic. She’d probably never see him again. Thinking about him, worrying about him, took her out of focus here.

So every morning it was,
Today I forget about him.

But at night she curled up, fetuslike, around an ache shaped like his name.

She felt not only lonely for him, but guilty for having left him to take this job. She’d been the only one he could open up to. Without her, he had to stay in that hard shell all the time. Emotionally claustrophobic . . . 

Unless he had already found someone else. There were other women in the resistance—and New Resistance women didn’t waste any time; they went after what they wanted.

Chu broke into Claire’s thoughts as she read the minutes of the last meeting, then went directly to the major topic for this one. “Security. Mr. Witcher has some concerns.”

“We’ve all got some concerns in that direction, I think,” Stoner said. He was a paunchy, wide-shouldered man with thinning grease-slicked hair and a face that was bland except for bright blue eyes. He wore an antique cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps and cowboy boots. He’d had to flee the CIA when the agency’s racist collaboration with the SA had “stuck in his craw.” Stoner and Russ Parker had hit it off despite some fundamental contrasts. Parker was a Christian and Stoner wasn’t; Stoner was a family man, come here with his black wife and child, and Parker was a longtime bachelor; Stoner was a northerner and Parker a southerner. But both were older men with a nostalgia for the middle twentieth century, and the somewhat mythical values of the American West.

And both of them had turned their lives upside down for the sake of conscience. Russ Parker had left the employ of the SA, staged a successful mutiny that had overthrown the Fascists who had wormed into power at the colony; Parker’s coup had become an administrative
fait accompli.
UNIC—the United Nations Industrial Council, a multigovernmental consortium that oversaw the Colony from Earth—accepted the unauthorized transfer of power. The Colony coup coincided with the discrediting of the Second Alliance International Security Corporation in the United States. UNIC perceived it was saved some political embarrassment. Parker had kept the
putsch
quiet.

“I’ve been debriefing Percy Witcher here,” Stoner was saying, “and it appears that there’s been a recent attempt on his life.” He went on to outline the missile attack on Witcher’s Kauai stronghold.

Chu said, “I don’t wish to seem inhospitable, but . . . the Colony is in some respects a fragile thing. If they want to get to him badly enough, they might be willing to sacrifice the Colony’s inhabitants.” She shrugged. “They’re willing to exterminate half of Europe if we let them. Why not the few thousand we have here?”

Russ pointed out, “Mr. Witcher is a major Colony stockholder, as of just about one month ago today, and without him the New Resistance just would not have gotten a single foothold. He’s been protecting us, and to me it’s pretty damn obvious it’s the good Lord’s will that we reciprocate.” His faint Texas accent was charming, Claire thought, but the reference to his Christianity embarrassed her. Primitive stuff.

Claire said, “The Second Alliance is well aware that the Colony is resistance-sympathetic now. We’re their target either way, I’m sure.”

“Anyway, I don’t think they’ve made him here,” Stoner said. “He covered his tracks pretty well. Used fake ID, arranged decoy ‘appearances’ in New York while he was at the launch site in Florida . . . ”

“I’ve got confirmation about an hour ago: they’re still looking for me in New York and Boston,” Witcher said. “They don’t know I’m here.”

“They will find out,” Chu said. “But it is true: we are quite possibly targets anyway.”

“The Colony is not a balloon,” Claire pointed out. “If you puncture it in one spot, it won’t all burst. My father built it with section integrity, so that if one section loses air pressure or becomes a danger in some other way, it’s sealed off. It would take a large nuclear device to really devastate the Colony. It could be crippled, though, in other ways—if someone hacks into the life-support system.” She paused, feeling a tug as she remembered the strange, posthumous sabotage her father had wreaked on the Colony. The others knew what she must be thinking about, and respectfully said nothing till she cleared her throat and went on. “It’s expensive, attacking us up here—from the outside.”

Stoner nodded sharply at the implication. “You got it. What we got to worry about is internal. The SA wants to get us, it’ll be from the inside.”

“What you need,” Witcher said flatly, “is a freeze in hiring. For starts.”

“That suits the union,” Lester said. “Except in external repairs—they’re shorthanded, after the RM17 thing . . . ”

“They’ll have to make do,” Parker said. “We can’t risk bringing in anyone new right now.”

“How many have you brought into the Colony in the last month?” Witcher asked.

“Maybe a dozen,” Claire said.

“How about tourists?”

“We aren’t letting them through yet, till we’ve finished repairs.”

“I recommend you don’t let them through at all until the SA problem is . . . resolved.”

Lester blinked. “T’ers!”

Witcher grimaced with impatience. “I really don’t speak Technicki.”

“Sorry. I said, it’1l take years!”

Witcher shrugged. “It’s the only safe course. And not just safer for me.”

“I reluctantly have to agree,” Stoner said. “No tourists—no stopover people . . . ”

Claire shook her head. “It’s not realistic. We can’t control who the Lunar Mining Corporation hires. And their people have to stop in here when they make the trip.”

“Then we’ll have them interrogated, and watched.” He hesitated, looking at Witcher. “Extractors might—”

“No!” Claire snapped, hitting the table with the palm of her hand. “Those things are the tools of fascism.”

“Both sides use them,” Witcher said.

“It doesn’t matter! The NR shouldn’t use them! It’s inviting fascism when the Resistance uses them! It’s laying the groundwork for a future fascism. It’s just wrong for any government to have access to a machine that can . . . can violate your inner thoughts, your memories! The right to privacy is the right to freedom, my dad used to say. Extractors ought to be outlawed everywhere.”

“They might be usefully employed by psychologists,” Chu suggested tentatively.

“Psychologists will just have to get by without them, if it’s up to me. No, I won’t have them. I’ll resign—”

“Whoa, slow down, honey,” Russ said hastily. “No one’s put in an order for an extractor.”

Claire had been doing an awe-inspiring job as administrator; no one wanted to lose her. She’d facilitated rapid repairs on the damage done to the Colony during the rebellion. She’d smoothed the transition to a redress of the balance of power so that technickis, the Colony’s working class, were able to move up without much resistance from the Admin minority. She was a general and a politician both.

“Then we’ll do it with camera surveillance and maybe a buddy system on visitors,” Stoner said. “But we have to do it.”

“Fine,” Claire said, telling herself to cool down. “You and Russ work up a brief on that for me.” Witcher was scowling now, she noticed. He wanted extractors. Maybe he wouldn’t be happy till he was on the Colony alone.

Chu went on to the next item, pay raises and improved housing for technickis.

Lester leaned forward. “Admin is falling behind on the timetable for reform.”

“We just haven’t got the resources to raise pay any further,” Claire said. “We’re cutting Admin paychecks considerably, as it is, in order to be able to afford—”

“Administrative positions are easier in some ways, and should not rate a better pay—” Lester began.

“Lester, I realize that you and Chu are ‘Reds.’ ” She used the slang term without denigration, saying it almost affectionately, the way an outsider would refer to the Amish. “But we are not all painted with the same brush here. I am just not a socialist. I believe that you need an incentive system for people to work hard.”

“When was the last time since the overthrow that you promoted a technicki?” His face had gone stony.

“There haven’t been any posts open. Be reasonable. It’s only been a short time. Trust us for a year, okay? Housing is improved—we have technickis moving into the Open almost every week.”

“But there is still a predominance of Admin people living in luxury in the Open housing projects—”

“I can’t just evict those people. The damage to morale . . . those people have children.”

“So do technicki families.”

He might have said,
So do I.
Claire admired Lester because he’d refused to move into a house offered him in the Open though she knew he longed for his wife and child to have a comfortable home. He wouldn’t go “till all technickis have decent housing.”

“We’re
building,
Lester, as fast as we can. There’s an ecological balance in the Colony’s parklands, and there are quality-of-life considerations—we don’t want to overdevelop. We’re building as much as we can, and we’re going to build a new section onto the Colony this year.” He opened his mouth to object again, and she broke in, “I’ll tell you what—I’ll meet with the union personally, offer them a better timetable for reform, and we’ll vote on it, set up a two-year schedule. It’s what we should have done anyway. We’ll find the middle ground.”

Lester held the hardness in his expression for two more beats. And then let it soften into a sardonic smile. “I guess I just been finessed. But okay.”

“I didn’t finesse you, Lester. You’ll see.” She turned to Chu. “Anything else pressing? I’ve got to get to the Comm center.”

“Nothing else.”

“Class dismissed!” Claire said, standing.

She hurried, out, feeling she couldn’t wait any longer: she had to contact Dan. Thoughts of Dan Torrence had distracted her too often. She needed to discharge them in some way so she could concentrate on her work.

Stoner caught up with her at the elevator, stepped on with her. “Hey,” he said when the doors closed. “You going to message Haifa?” Meaning their Mossad contacts in Israel: the message conduit to the New Resistance in Europe.

She nodded, and he handed her a datastick. “I was going to get permission from you for a message—could you transmit that for me and then erase it? And listen—before you scramble it, read it when it comes up on the screen. I thought maybe you should know my thoughts . . . No real emergency, but—I wanted to keep you up to speed.”

“Sure, okay. But what’s it about?”

“Just . . . read it. The whole thing.”

He got out at the next floor. Thoughtfully, she watched him go. He had seemed to be saying something more than he was saying out loud.

In the Comm Center, she booted up the message file Stoner had given her and read it. Intelligence reports, none of it really arresting. But at the end, she found what he’d been talking about; something earmarked for Smoke and Steinfeld:

Witcher keeps popping up with blank spots. He’s covering something from me, and being pretty cagey about it. It’s nothing I can call him on. I don’t think it’s any kind of special relationship with the other side. His hostility for the SA is almost pathological. But some of his own operations (including Orange County Research operations) are still opaque to me. Also, he says things that worry me. I quote verbatim: “The trouble with the world is there are too many people on it to manage. It could be a utopia, it really could, a place of racial harmony, all the races living in peace and complete equality, if there were only, say, a few million people to administer . . . ” The guy means: a few million people on the whole damn planet. I don’t know, maybe it’s just paranoia on my part. Maybe it’s nothing . . .