A Song Called Youth (2 page)

Yates had shrugged and sent the communiqué to the nearest NATO ship with surveillance equipment, the
Lady Di.

And the bird had been set free.

But not free to fly about at random. It flew in a widening spiral pattern through the civilian areas, looking and listening for gatherings of “four or more civilians.” There weren’t many people left in Amsterdam, so the job wasn’t as time-consuming as it might seem. When the bird found gatherings of four or more civilians (not very often) it attached itself to the outer wall of the building in which the gathering was taking place, and it laid an egg. The “egg” was actually a tiny hemisphere of nanomaterials that clung to brick or concrete or glass or plasteel and sent out minute sensors. The sensors picked up the heartbeats of people, and if there were enough heartbeats close together, it transmitted a signal. Under martial law it was illegal for more than three persons to gather together without supervision, except in designated areas. The designated areas were under even closer surveillance.

The commander of The Netherlands unit made the gathering-size rule as there had been some trouble with what he described as “low-grade terrorist conspiracies.”

Yates, having dispatched the birds to watch for illegal meetings, dispatched another communiqué to the SAISC, telling them what he’d done. Soothing them.

The SA, receiving the message, communicated with their contacts in the USAF Jumpjet Reconnaisance Unit. SA sympathizers in Jumpjet Recon were given the frequency specifics of the transmitting “eggs,” and were urgently requested “in the spirit of cooperation,” to “triangulate these terrorist cabals and do what is necessary to put them out of business.”

The bird flew from one block to another, mile after mile, occasionally attaching eggs. After the third time, it flew past a certain high-rise, where it startled a real bird, a crow, which had been restlessly circling the building.

The crow was shaken by this close encounter with a “UFO” and took itself to the nearest terrace railing to recuperate. It settled onto the railing, looked around, and saw with relief that the bird with the metal wings and a glass head had flown away.

But someone else was there, at the other end of the terrace.

Part One:
SMOKE

• 01 •

“This city is dead.” He said it out loud, to a crow. The big black crow was perched on the concrete railing that ran mostly intact around the rubbled terrace. They were thirty stories above the flooded street, where dusk darkened the floodwater to indigo.

The crow heard, tilted a glare at him. Smoke went on, “This city is dead, and I’m someone. I’m still someone. Being here hasn’t helped.” He spoke to the crow and to the clammy, acidic breeze—it smelled like a ruptured car battery—that lifted the edges of the rain-caked stack of printouts some looter had tossed onto the terrace. “I’m still Smoke, Jack Brendan Smoke, or Brendan Jack Smoke or Smoke Jack Brendan. Mix it up the way you want, it’s still there. I thought it would leach off here, crow. Like . . . ” He paused, not sure if he was speaking aloud or thinking it now, and wondering which it was. He shrugged and went on, “Like you have a pan of water, nothing else, just dead flat calm water, and you pour, say, a little ink into it, and the ink spreads out, gets all diluted, in a few days, you can’t see it anymore. But it didn’t work. The ink is still there. I’m still Smoke . . . I could leave Amsterdam, crow. I might not be Jack Smoke where there’s enough people. Lost in a crowd. I could go to Paris. There’re still a lot of people in Paris.”

The crow’s claws made a skittering sound as it shifted on its perch. Shifted a little closer to him.

It occurred to Smoke that the crow might not be real; might be a cybernetic fake. But he was past caring.

Smoke put his hands on the railing, felt the concrete’s cold bite his palms. He looked at his hands. They seemed creatures apart from him: clawlike gray things, with horny, overgrown yellow nails. He looked that way, all of him: clawlike, gaunt, dark with grime, his layers of scavenged shirts and jackets and pants gone all raggedy edged and uniformly dirt-colored, so he looked like a crow himself, in molting. He had long, matted black hair and beard, and a bird’s bright black eyes and an eagle-beak nose. He chuckled softly, thinking that perhaps the crow had mistaken him for one of its own . . . 

“It’d be better to be a crow,” Smoke said. He looked away from his hands, out over the railing at the city—the necropolis.

This section of Amsterdam was relatively intact, as if mummified, and that amplified the absence of human movement; as if someone had thrown a switch that simply turned off the people the way you’d switch off a hologram: click . . . zip, they’re gone.

Smoke tried to visualize Amsterdam the way it had been just five years ago: The streets feverish with cars and buses, most of them self-driving and electric; traffic pulsing on the bridges of the “city of one thousand and one bridges”; flat barges gliding on the Amstel and on sedate, tree-shaded canals flowing slow and thick as green candle wax. It was a city built in rings of streets and canals, most of the architecture remaining as it had been, gabled and red-bricked, when it was built in the seventeenth century. The city had permitted only a few high-rises, in certain zones, like the shell Smoke and the crow perched in now. Now, and all was the same as five minutes ago except it was just a dilute ink-wash darker. There was no going back in time. There was only going forward, one second at a time, as things fell apart.

The clammy wind soughed like an ache through the concrete corridors; the flood made a hollow
whush
like the sea heard in a seashell.

The overcast sky was a lowering ceiling of smudged charcoal black on charcoal gray; the upper reaches of the high-rise faded into cloud, as if the building became less real as it went up and was entirely imaginary at its peak.

Smoke leaned over the balcony and looked down. The floodwaters filling the avenue were sinuous with current, moving, tugging the yellow blob of Smoke’s rubber raft tied up at the second-story window ledge. The water was rising. Perhaps the Zaider Zee would return, to reclaim Holland.

“Oh, you could
say
the city was still alive,” Smoke said to the crow. It must have been aloud, because the crow fluttered its wings in response. “Because there are still people in it, on the higher ground, squatting here and there. Maybe a few thousand, maybe a few hundred. That’s life, but it’s the life in a corpse—micro-organisms that live on after the host has died. Hair that grows though the skull is empty. And the SA will be here soon. So the corpse’ll be maggoty. And, you could say, ‘Maggots are alive.’ ”

The crow looked interested. “But still, Amsterdam is dead . . . New York is alive, Tokyo and Cairo are alive, very much alive. But this city . . . ”

The crow made a caw that somehow sounded reproachful.

“What is it?” Smoke asked. “Is it that I talk to myself? Because talking to a bird, or anything that can’t talk back, is really talking to myself? Is that it? I remember being twenty-five and feeling sorry for people who talked to themselves on the street. They were crazy. Or senile. And now I do it—I don’t say anything that would compromise Steinfeld, though. So I guess I’m not so far gone. Well I did just say his name. So maybe I’m losing it. And I’m only thirty-five now. I look older, crow, but I’m not. At least, I
think
I’m thirty-five. And something.”

The crow cawed again, and Smoke thought it sounded sympathetic.

“I talk to myself compulsively,” Smoke said; “I think I once wrote a paper about the phenomenon . . . I tried to make myself stop, for the sake of dignity. But dignity”—he gestured toward the flooded streets—“is underwater, with Rembrandt’s house. The water reaches into houses and floats the corpses out . . . ”

Color caught his eye. A fantail of sunset red creeping across one of the southeast windows of the building across from him. Windows on the southeast side were often intact, because most of the tactical warheads had detonated in the northeastern part of the city. And the red glaze reminded him to check his radbadge. He fumbled in the folds of his shirts, the four shirts he wore one atop the next, and found the radiation indicator like a convention badge pinned to his rotting jogger’s sweatshirt. Only a faint corner of the badge had gone red, which was all right.

“It’s all right,” he told the crow. “Voortoven says he wishes they’d dropped a Big One on Amsterdam. Instead of torturing us with this slow war. Reneging on their promise to get the third one over in a few minutes. You ever feel that way? Like you wish they’d just
gone for it?
You want some bread? I think it’s safe. I stuck a radbadge—I got a sack of them from Steinfeld—I stuck a badge, in the—here it is—” Rummaging in a greasy knapsack. “Left it in overnight, not a smidge of red. So the bread’s okay . . . Here.” He found the stale bread in its plastic bag, carefully unwrapped it, cursed when a few crumbs dropped. He licked a finger, touched the crumbs, sucked them into his mouth, watching the crow. The crow observed him fixedly, hopping nearer on the concrete rail.

He broke off a corner of the bread and held it out to the crow.

The crow’s utter lack of caution surprised him: it hopped up and plucked the bread from his fingers like a man accepting a stick of chewing gum. Casual, familiar.

Smoke watched, fascinated, as the crow placed the crust on the ledge, then held it down with a claw to keep the breeze from stealing it, and meticulously chipped the bread apart, throwing its head back to down the crusty stuff, till only crumbs were left, and the wind got them.

“I’m supposed to be recruiting,” Smoke confided to the crow. “Steinfeld says there are likelies here. In one of the rises. Not in this one, though.”

He looked out over the city, saw it bruised in sunset. There was another high-rise a block north. It looked as lifeless as this one. He felt an alien touch on the index finger of his right hand and thought,
A
bombspider,
and twitched his hand away, revolted—

The crow flapped on his finger, clinging despite his sharp motion, looking at him crossly as it adjusted.

He gaped for a moment and then laughed. “You’re trained! You belonged to someone!”

The crow twitched its wings in a way that was eerily like shrugging.

Experimentally, he put his hand to his right shoulder, and the crow fluttered onto a new perch there, settled down, perfectly at home, and all of a sudden Smoke felt just a little bit different. About everything.

• 02 •

Smoke walked into their trap, waited till they’d closed the trap around him, and all the time politely pretended not to know it was happening. He pretended to be watching the L-5 Colony.

The artificial star glittered in the night sky like a fine timepiece, forty degrees from the horizon. He saw it for ten seconds through a break in the clouds, and then it was erased by mist. He wondered if the War had reached out to the Space Colony—halfway to the moon—and, if it had, if anyone was still alive there.

And then the crow tensed and made a rasping sound Smoke was to learn meant
Watch your ass!
 . . . and the three men closed in on him from three directions. The crow fluttered; he whispered to it, and it quieted down, pleasing him with its responsiveness.

He was standing at a window, looking out at the gray stalagmite outline of the high-rise where he’d met the crow. “I was over in that ’rise,” he told the men, “and I looked at this one and couldn’t see a fire or anything moving.”

He heard one of them cock a gun.

And then again, Smoke was not so different, even after feeling that things had shifted: he still found himself hoping that the man would use the gun.

But behind Smoke, a man with a leader’s voice said, “Turn around.”

Smoke turned slowly around and saw a compact young man in his early thirties—but, no. Wrong. Subtract the etchings of wartime stress and fatigue and hunger, and the man was perhaps mid-twenties. He was gaunt from hunger; his chin was just a shade too prominent, like the old drawings of the man-in-the-moon at quarter-phase, and his forehead was high; he had a straight nose; a wry, red-lipped mouth; and small, dark-lashed green eyes rimmed with sleeplessness. His hair was thatchy, oily because it was something he ignored. When it was clean, it was probably blond. He was not more than five-seven, and lean in a weathered brown flight jacket that looked like it had done its flying in bad weather; ancient, faded Levi’s; motorcycle boots held together with duct tape.

He was carrying a . . . Smoke stared. “Where’d you get the old Weatherby?” he asked, interested. The boy was carrying a Weatherby Mark V hunting rifle. Gun must be thirty, forty years old, Smoke thought. Bolt action, .460 Magnum. Long, long rifle. Developed for big-game hunting. Anomalous thing to find here, Smoke thought.

The man with the green eyes chuckled and shook his head. His eyes didn’t change expression when he laughed. They remained flat, hard, candid. “You’re supposed to be scared,” he said, “not asking where I got my gun.”

“So he knows all about guns,” one of the other men said. Moved to Smoke’s right. He was a big-framed man who had the look of someone who’d been overweight, starved down to sagging folds. He wore a long black coat, open at the front. And to Smoke’s left there was a twitch-eyed vulture of a man breathing noisily through his open mouth. He wore a raincoat and beneath that something so ragged it was unidentifiable. The starved bear carried a .22 rifle, and the vulture carried a sort of mace made from nails soldered to a long pipe. “If he knows about guns,” the bear went on, “he ain’t some wanderin’ tramp.”

“That logic is questionable,” Smoke said. “A wandering tramp is someone who used to be someone
else
—and when he was the someone else he might have made guns his hobby. I am, in fact, a wandering tramp. That doesn’t mean I don’t have business. I have business. But I’m not an eye for the Armies. And I’m here unarmed.”

“What’s your ‘business’?” the green-eyed one asked, jeering the word
business.