A Song Called Youth (130 page)

“Who is it, Witcher?” Russ asked. “Where are they?”

“Oh, she’s ostensibly an NR agent,” Witcher said. “I have an arrangement with her. To release the virus in a certain population center. She doesn’t know the whole of my strategy.” He wiped his eyes with a sleeve. Gave a cavalier smile. Had his aplomb back. “I’ll make a start and I’ll destroy you people. And then I’ll start over.”

“Where’s the virus?” Russ asked.

Witcher chuckled.

That kiddy-show-host smile came back.

And then he switched off the fone.

• 12 •

Mexico.

Smoke was there. Jerome was there. Bettina was there. Kessler was there. Richard the crow was there.

Kessler was a medium-tall, round-faced man with short black hair, streaked blue-white to signify his work as a video tech. Big brown eyes, rather girlish mouth. Looked soft, Smoke thought, but he was sharp and tough as nails. He wore, like Smoke and Barrabas, feather-light white peon pajamas, and sandals. Jerome wore jeans, no shirt, mirror sunglasses.

The crow was on Smoke’s shoulder, Jerome was sitting across the terrace table from Smoke, Kessler on one side of Jerome, Bettina on the other. All of them on the sun-baked, stone-flagged terrace outside the NR’s chip-training installation. It was only eleven in the morning, but the day was bright and already hot; the big table umbrella didn’t make enough shade. The tall glasses of iced tea they were drinking weren’t cooling enough. Especially for Bettina, who wore a ghastly little orange-print housedress and thongs. She got up and moved gelatinously to the other terrace table, dragged it over, making it squeal across the stone, so its umbrella blocked the sun at her back.

She heaved herself back into the creaking wrought-iron chair and, wiping sweat from her face with a dish towel, said, “Where Patrick and Jo Ann at?”

“Here they are,” Smoke said, nodding toward the glass sliding doors that let onto the terrace.

Carrying ice teas, Barrabas and Jo Ann came blinking out into the sunlight; pulled chairs up from the other table and hunched beside Smoke in the shade.

“It’s hot out here,” Jo Ann said, “but it’s worse indoors.” She looked out at the desert stretching away brown and purple to her right. “Smells good. Smells like sage. What’s that noise?”

“Cicada, or something like it,” Smoke said.

“You nature boys done with de vague entomology, let’s get on wid dis shit,” Bettina said. “I wanna get in de wading pool. Alouette’s filling it up for me ’n’ her.”

“Won’t be room for her in it,” Jerome said.

She took a swipe at him; he was prepared, and ducked it.

“I get yo’ skinny white ass later,” she said. She turned to Smoke. “Let’s talk and get it over wid.”

“Things are serious now,” Smoke said. “Find some patience, Bettina.”

“Things always serious. Serious for years now.”

“It’s come to a head,” said Smoke. He sipped his tea, his ice clinking, looking at the horizon. A distant jet doodled a curly contrail on the blue-white sky. He went on, “It’s all timing, you see. And the timing has to be decided
now.
”

Jerome said, “I think you oughta just go ahead, let Hand spill the beans, let Barrabas witness for us, hit ’em with a frontal attack. Now. Their computers are fucked up, their bosses are arresting each other, fighting for top control. We ain’t sure what the timetable with the RSV is. Why don’t you just go for it?”

“Because of certain military factors. And because of the Leng Entelechy.”

Jerome groaned. “We’re not really going to try that, are we? You’ll have us wearing crystals for good vibes next.”

Bettina ducked her head in a way peculiar to her that signified bafflement. “The Leng
what
-uh-hicky?”

“Don’t play dumb just because you’re not in a mood to work today, Bettina,” Smoke snapped. Thinking:
The heat’s making us all irritable.
“The word is ‘entelechy.’ It means fulfillment of potential—a system coming to a fulfillment that something in it is . . . is reaching for.”

“A term from vitalism, isn’t it?” Kessler asked.

“Yes. But in this case we’re interested in the entelechy of the collective psychic field.”

“The collective psychic field?” Kessler smiled, chuckling urbanely. “You mean the one which probably doesn’t exist?”

Jo Ann said, “This Leng guy—is he the Shrimp Man?”

“I doubt he’d appreciate that nickname, but yes. Dioxin birth defects, born without arms and legs. Body shaped sort of like a shrimp. Gets around in a very nice exoskeletal prosthesis. One of the best microbiologists around. Combined Earth science with microbiology and physics. Nobel prize in 2016.”

“Nobel prize doesn’t mean he couldn’t have a crank idea,” Kessler said.

“You work hard on being cynical, Mr. Kessler?” Jo Ann said.

“I just think that ‘supernatural’ phenomena is psychological, not psychic,” Kessler said. “It’s a question of conditioning input, shared psycho-programming symbols, myth-symbol projection, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t think this
is
a supernatural phenomenon,” Smoke said. He reached up and scratched under the crow’s beak. It bit his finger, but only playfully. Then cocked its head as something rustled in the sere grass and stony ground beside the patio. Smoke went on, “Leng doesn’t regard it as supernatural. He regards it as a weak bioelectric field uniting all life on Earth. He got interested in it as a young man when he read about a study done in the 1980s. The study found that under certain circumstances, if you taught a trick to a group of rats . . . ”

“Come on, man,” Bettina interrupted, swabbing her forehead and jowls, “I don’ have time for scientific studies about no damn
rats.
Get to de fucking point.”

Smoke went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “—then other rats who
weren’t around
suddenly knew the trick too . . . as if it had simply been in the air. The effect was more pronounced when there was a greater conductivity in the air. And among people we have the phenomenon of an ‘idea being in the air’—sometimes it’s because of parallel stimulus, social reasons, but other times it happens with disparate cultures at opposite ends of the Earth who had no contact at all. Simultaneously. What it all boils down to—”

“Yeah, boil it down before I boil down,” Bettina snapped.

“—is a body of evidence that indicates there’s a collective unconscious mind of some sort linking people.”

“Well, fuck,” she said, “who don’t know
that
?”

Jerome nodded. “I’ve felt it at gigs.”

Smoke nodded. “Rickenharp used to talk about that. The field is weak and it’s subject to a variety of stresses, but it’s there. Leng found a way to sense it and measure it and predict its cycle of intensity. Its impulses travel around the world in waves. Like a big psychic tsunami. Subtle, but affecting the brain of every human on the planet—on some level.” He saw Bettina’s impatience about to erupt, and he added hastily, “We can use this stuff ourself, perhaps, yes, Bettina. I’m coming to it. It might be possible to introduce electromagnetically encoded information into the Group Mind Wave at certain times—and use it to communicate an insight to everyone on the planet. Just a little psychic nudge, you see. Through the Plateau. Leng has the technique—there’s a specific frequency . . . ”

Kessler turned Smoke a pained and puzzled look. “You’re going to delay our move just to wait for the optimum time for this . . . this entelechy? What about the virus? You’re going to risk the life of every person of color on the planet just to test your theory?”

Smoke shook his head. “No. We’re waiting for Torrence and Steinfeld to line up their strikes. They’re working things out with Badoit, getting some gear together for the EMP action.”

“The what?” Jerome said.

“Electromagnetic pulse. They want to completely pull the plug on Second Alliance finances so they can’t finance counter-propaganda, can’t pay their people, whole SPOES falls apart.”

“Electromagnetic pulse. I was afraid that’s what you meant,” Jerome grimaced. “Don’t be doing that shit around
me.
Or around anyone else with a chip implant.” He tapped his head. “Fuck ’em up.”

“The military operations are supposed to get us some hard evidence about the virus, to back up Jo Ann here,” Smoke said.

Kessler was shaking his head. “No. You’re gambling they won’t use the thing before you get this all set up. You
can’t
gamble that way. We should announce the thing now, start raising people’s consciousness about it, do our best with what we have. Now.”

“De man’s right!” Bettina burst out. “You ain’t gambling wid you own motherfucking race, Smoke! It’s wid mine! And a whole lot of de rest of de world!”

“We don’t think we’re gambling. We know a bit about the Racially Selective Virus. We know it’s isolated now in one lab and one storage facility. Both in London. It’s not the sort of thing they can simply release in any city and let it do its work. Temperature conditions have to be optimal. Plus they have to have multiple simultaneous releases—the virus dies out fast. They designed it that way so it would be less likely to mutate. And they’re worried that it might not be as selective as they think—one gene wrong in your DNA and it could kill you. They’re not all certain about their own ancestors. How much Jewish blood is enough to make the pathogen kill you? They’ve got those technical problems. I heard they thought they had that under control, but they’re still testing. It’s going to take them a while to set this up—”

“That’s what your intelligence tells you. Your Badoit, your NR espionage,” Kessler said. Shaking his head. “That’s basically hearsay. You’re just gambling that it’s true. I say don’t gamble.”

“I think he’s right too, Smoke,” Jerome said.

Barrabas spoke for the first time. “The thing’s got to be stopped. People should be told with all speed. Maybe there’s some sort of preventive antiviral measures . . . ”

“If it comes to that. We’re watching them. We have a man on the inside. We’ll know if they start to move.”

“You
hope
you’ll know,” Kessler said. “You hope you know about where they’re storing the stuff. You’d better be right. He stood up and walked away from the table, into the building.

Bettina drank the rest of her tea and most of Jerome’s, then began crunching up the ice in her teeth. All the time eyeing Smoke balefully.

“Man’s right,” she said. Crunch, crunch. “You gambling.”

“It would be gambling to do things precipitously,” Smoke said. “Gambling that it’d work best that way. We don’t think it would.”

In the silence that followed, something rustled in the dry grass again.

“You know what, Smoke,” Jerome said finally, “when you were talking about the entelechy, you sounded like a religious convert, man. It’s something you’d like to believe in. Maybe some connection to God. Makes you feet less lonely. That’s cool. But maybe it’s slanting the way you’re planning things.”

“It isn’t just me,” Smoke said. Feeling odd. Wondering if Jerome was right. “It’s Torrence and Steinfeld and Badoit. Witcher approved it. Steinfeld and Badoit . . . ” He paused, allowing himself to look a little hurt. “ . . . are threatened by the virus, too. Their races.”

“Look, man,” Bettina said, “I don’t mean to say you don’ give a fuck about black people, but let’s face it—”

“My race is threatened by this thing,” Smoke said. “The human race. Homo sapiens. That’s my race, Bettina.”

They looked at him; he looked out at the desert.

A rustling. Then a dusty-gray tarantula, bristly and kinklegged, crawled up onto the edge of the flagstones about thirty feet away. Jo Ann saw it and cringed in her seat. “Oh, God, I hate those things. I can’t stand them, I really can’t. I hate spiders, and those are the worst. Patrick—”

Barrabas said hastily, “They give me the willies, too, love. Can’t stand spiders, not me.”

“Why’s it comin’ out inna daytime?” Bettina wondered. “They nocturnal.”

“It’s supposed to be an omen,” Jerome said, “when animals act unnaturally.”

Jo Ann looked at Smoke. “Could you . . . ?”

Smoke was thinking about something else. About gambles. About death.

Jo Ann had gone white. She said, “Oh, God, it’s coming this way. Somebody. I can’t move. I’m really arachnaphobic. Please.”

Bettina said, “Jerome, git that damn thing so this woman’ll shut up.”

“
Me?
”

Bettina made a snorting sound of disgust and stood up, the suddenness of it knocking her chair over with a clang. She stalked over to the tarantula—and stomped it, once, hard, with the bottom of her thong. Squish.

Jo Ann looked away, covering her mouth, as Bettina took off her thong, scraped spider mush off it onto the edge of a flagstone, and flicked the mess into the grass. Then she went to the spigot in the side of the building to wash the thong. There were still pieces of tarantula legs sticking out from the bottom of it.

The crow fluttered up into the air, flew over to the edge of the flagstones . . . 

FirStep, the Colony.

Russ had never done EVA work. He didn’t think he was going to like it. He was right.

Russ Parker was walking ponderously through a vacuum, across a steel plain. His magnetic boots grabbed the hull with a clink that rang inside his suit. Every step was an effort; he was only a quarter mile along and already getting winded. He looked for Lester, panicked for a moment when he didn’t see him. Then realized the crappy peripheral vision on this old helmet had lost Lester in its blind spot.

He turned his head, saw him a stride or two behind, plugging on strong. It made him feel better to see Lester there. He was a good man, and knew what he was doing out here. He had a fair amount of EVA time.

Coming out of hull airlock 70 had been a thrill, despite his fears about Witcher. They were on the cold side, facing away from the sun, and there was no solar glare. The stars out there . . . 

You saw the stars in the shuttle, and from inside the Colony. But the parallax here, the horizonless openness of it, made him feel that the Colony—millions of tons of crystallized alloy—was a single spore of pollen, and he was less than a dust mite clinging to it. The stars out here had a certain regal brittleness to their shine, sharp-edged as the tone of a synthesizer’s high-C. The Earth was a Christmas-tree bulb. The moon a night-light.