A Song Called Youth (7 page)

Bonham nodded. “Something in that.”

The talk and the place were ordinary, and that felt all right: they were between duty-pulls, they had a week, and they could amble through everything and the week wouldn’t have to go as fast as usual, if they were careful.

But everything was going to change in twenty minutes.

“You catch the news about the Admin bimbo?” Bonham asked.

“One bimbo at a time. I’m gonna go see—”

“Kelly? She costs more than she’s worth, Molt.”

“She digs me.”

“Whores pretend, Molt, that’s all. They’re consummate actresses, for one role and one only. And don’t try to tell me you made her cum—”

They went on like that for a while, neither man attending the conversation with his whole mind. And in fifteen minutes everything was going to change.

“So what’d you see onna news?” Molt asked, at last.

“Rimpler’s daughter. Cute little thing but super-chilled, I heard. She was taking some kubs out into the Open and one of ’em refused to come back, made a great speech how they were being cheated of their fair share of Open. Spengle made her look like—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did hear about that. Somebody had a handset on the shuttle and—yeah, the technickis on the shuttle were glued on that one, man.”

“Smart move, whoever set that up,” Bonham mused. “There’s a protest tomorrow. You wanna come along?”

“Maybe. But . . . 
you
know, Christ . . . ” The two men exchanged commiserating looks and sighed. They’d be surrounded by technics yammering technicki at the demonstration. But they had principles to live up to. Molt shrugged. “Where’s it going to be?”

“Corridor D-five.”

“Yeah, okay. What the hell.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s go to Bitchie’s, it’s probably open for—”

“Is that all you ever think about? Listen, you hear about the SWS readings for the dorm sections?”

“The what? Oh. No. What about it?”

SWS: Solar Wind Shield. The atmospheric envelope generated at the Ice-Lode Station. There were persistent rumors that the Admin crews didn’t keep the shield’s regularity field in place over the Colony’s technicki section; that they were indifferent to cancer risks for technickis.

“The reading was negligible, that’s what. About as much field as my mother has testicles.”

“The field has to be uniform for the Colony to go on working at all.”

They argued Colony politics for the next ten minutes. Molt was the voice of moderation. Social Democrat to Bonham’s Post-Trotskyite. At least, that’s the way Molt was until he got angry, scented violence. But just now, he was quiet as a bomb before it explodes.

In five minutes everything was going to change.

The waitress, Carla, wandered by the tables, picking up glasses, yawning. She was a horsey bleached blonde with a Reservationist’s tattoo half showing through her body stocking. Molt and Bonham exchanged banter with her for four minutes.

In one minute, everything would be different.

Carla went inside to bring out two more weak beers. She came out a minute later, without the beer, her hand clapped over her mouth.

“What’s the matter?” Bonham asked. “What’s the story, Carla?” Molt asked. Their questions jumbled together.

She looked at them, her bloodshot blue eyes stricken, her face paler than usual. She mumbled something through her hand.

Scared by inference, Molt irritably pulled her hand from her mouth and said, “Dammit, Carla, transmit!”

“The Russians. I heard it on the vid just now.”

“The Russians what?” Molt asked, thinking, Oh, shit, maybe they finally launched the big ones.

“They blockaded the Colony. Activated their laser platforms, the battle stations . . . Got ships hanging out there . . . 
They won’t let our shuttles through. We’re cut off.
”

Bonham was scared and looked it. But the fear melted away in Molt, and he realized he’d been waiting for this. He’d been holding something back for a long time. This meant he could let it all out. He could kill a few assholes.

Because everything was different. Now.

• 04 •

The rainstorm had blown onward. The sky had cleared, except for a soft breakage of clouds, light blue against the dark blue twilight.

Smoke was at the window, looking out at the sky, squinting as he tried to see some detail of the Colony; but it was just a pale glimmer, a fragment of Bethlehem’s marker, forty degrees above the horizon. “They made that thing up there out of asteroids and pieces of the moon.” He spoke to Richard Pryor and the crow tilted its head as if listening, and Smoke was grateful. Talking to yourself didn’t look quite so undignified when you had something, someone, to pretend you were talking to.

Dignity. A haggard, grimy, stooped, gaunt, bearded man. His gray-shot black beard matted, his eyes too intense, his hands always faintly shaking and dirty as rat’s claws. And we’re talking about dignity?

But dignity was everything to Smoke.

Hard-Eyes and Jenkins were behind Smoke, their backs to him, talking to Steinfeld and Voortoven and Willow. Yukio was there, too, but he wasn’t talking. Smoke knew Yukio was listening, though.

Smoke listened to bits and pieces as Hard-Eyes and Steinfeld interrogated one another. Smoke tuned in and out.

He kept his eyes on the man-spark hanging in the blue-black sky.

(Just below the window ledge, on the outside, gleaming with rainwater, was the egg, the metal bird had attached the day before. It was sending a signal that meant
They’re in the room now
 . . . )

Smoke looked at the sky, and, now and then, he listened.

“Let’s talk basics,” Hard-Eyes was saying. “We’re talking no salary, not even after the revolution, supposing that ever happens.”

“No salary: correct. But I didn’t say anything about a revolution. We’re not revolutionaries. We’re international partisans. We want to re-establish the republics that existed before the war. Elimination of the jurisdiction of the Second Alliance is obviously a prerequisite.”

“ ‘Elimination,’ ” Jenkins said. “Has a nice clean sound to it.” There was no subtlety to Jenkins’ sarcasm, “How big you say the SA weighed in at?”

Steinfeld hesitated. Smoke couldn’t see him, but he knew the man and his mannerisms. He could imagine stocky, tired-eyed Steinfeld with his long, iron-gray hair neatly parted in the middle, caught up in the back with a twist of wire. With his black beard, the white streak down the middle so neat-edged it could almost have been dyed there. The short, blunt fingers raised, fanned out just above the top of the scarred desk, the deltas of fine lines at his eyes deepening as he concentrated on his reply. His ineffaceable sense of mission never faltering no matter how much he backed and filled and weaved and bobbed in his dealings.
Whop
—the hands coming down flat on the desk as Steinfeld spoke: “Half-million, it’s said. And growing.”

“Half-million. They have a half-million men in Europe.” Jenkins said it with stagey disbelief.

Steinfeld went on to answer the unasked question hanging in the air. “And all told, if we count splinter groups, factions, the NR could muster four, five thousand. But on this front of the resistance, we’re not going after them head-on. We sabotage, we guerrilla their flanks, we chew a lot of little wounds in them till they weaken from bleeding.”

“Go back to the part about “this front’,” Hard-Eyes said. “What’s the other front?”

“Negotiating for help. From the Japanese. And others. We’re working on it.”

“What about the States?” Jenkins asked.

“You must be bloody joking,” Willow said. Willow—in olive-drab fatigues, tennis shoes rotting apart, stolen AK-49 assault rifle across his lap. Broomstick skinny, thatch of colorless hair, a beard that belonged on some aging Chinese emperor, bad teeth; spoke in a monotone, the British mumble. “Fucking Yanks wanking off the fucking Nazis.” He pronounced it
Nazzies.
“They like the fascist takeover becorz they figure it’s either that or commies. And they got big promises for big business deals from the fascists.”

“All this . . . ” Steinfeld tilting his head back, making the beard jut at the ceiling. So Smoke pictured it (all the time watching the indistinguishable movement of the Colony). “All this . . . supposition. But I do think they have come to
some
accommodation.”

“Mark me,” Willow said, “they plan to divide fucking Western Europe up betwixt the blewdy power brokers.”

“I’m still thinking about ‘no salary,’ ” Hard-Eyes said flatly.

“What do you believe in?” Voortoven asked. He was a broadchested, muscular man, always clean. Curly brown hair.

“What?” Hard-Eyes was a little startled.

“Do you believe in anything at all? You just want money to bribe your way back to the States? You going to play the drifter who does not get involved? Or you are, maybe, a mercenary?”

“We’re not above using mercenaries,” Steinfeld said, a fraction hastily. “ ‘Mercenary’ is no insult.”

Voortoven snorted.

Steinfeld went on, “We can’t pay money, but we can pay in goods and, eventually, in transportation.”

“I want to know what he believes in,” Voortoven said.

Forty-five seconds of silence as they waited for Hard-Eyes to declare himself.

Hard-Eyes said, finally, “When I find it, I’ll know it.”

“To know what we are takes time,” Steinfeld said. Steinfeld was Israeli. Long history of involvement in radical movements, Democratic Socialist, but never stained Marxist. It was assumed he had a family in Israel. He’d never mentioned them, but there were pictures in his wallet no one had seen up close. And it was assumed he was run by the Mossad—which might be a wrong assumption.

Hard-Eyes had heard that one, too. “You might be anyone,” he said, looking at Steinfeld. “I could get killed and never know who I’d been working for. Dying for.”

A full seventy seconds of silence this time. And then Jenkins said, “You say we could trade some mercenary work for
transportation.
We work for you awhile and then . . . ”

Smoke stopped listening. He focused on the Colony and said, “Richard, you know how many tons that thing is, up there? More than the membranes of thinking can carry.”

The crow fluttered and dug at its breast for a louse.

“You’re not impressed? Crows take bright things into their nests, Richard. The Colony construct is both a nest and a bright thing. You know how many tons that nest is, Richard?”

The crow shook itself.

“I don’t either. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. At least it’d weigh that on Earth. They’re supposed to be making it bigger and bigger. There are no crows there . . . ”

Looking at the Colony, a city tossed into the sky, Smoke felt a sucking vertigo. He looked away from it, down to the Earth. He and the crow gazed out at the wrecked harbor, beyond to the Ijsselmeer, and Smoke had a strange sense of being
in place,
wedged somewhere outside the flow of time.

The harbor’s flooding had submerged the docks and boardwalks; it had thrown boathouses up past the sidewalks, half crushed them against the swamped bases of the buildings; it had wedged boats into alleys and had made trucks and cars the new housing development of octopi and sea anemones. There was a whirlpool marked by twisting fluorescent foam where the outflowing currents from the rivered streets met the tidal push of the sea. The harbor’s sea vista was hobbled by half-sunk ships, boats, tankers jutting like tombstones. There, and there, well apart, were two dull red throbs, where campfires illuminated stanchions and deck fittings on the upthrusting superstructures of two foundered ships; a couple of squatters there, perhaps three more over there, feeling relatively secure on the wrecks with expanses of cold seawater between them and everything else; more security than in the city, where scavengers roamed the rooftops or sculled the narrow, flooded streets in boats.

Smoke’s eyes were drawn by movement; the high movement of electric light. One of the Armies’ aircraft. There—over the collapsed roof of the warehouse. A USAF jumpjet. Recon patrol, maybe; hovering, and bobbing up and down the way a jet shouldn’t be able to, moving almost like a kite. Casimir force combined with standard thrust, tiltable jets. Now and then it darted a searchbeam into windows.

Ought to close this one before it notices us, Smoke thought.

But then the jumpjet veered off, due east. Gone.

Drone of voices behind him. But he was turned outward, to the mortuary peace of the harbor.

A movement of cold air—too slow to be a breeze, more of an oozing than a blowing, numbing Smoke’s nose and cheeks, making his ears sting. It was scented with the brine and the clean rot of the ocean—strange there could be a clean rot but in the absence of men it was so—and a trace of oil, and woodsmoke.

A fog was curling in, sending wraith outriders, and tentatively entwining rusty hulls, the wooden snags of pylons, battleship superstructures, and sailing-yacht yardarms. Under the wrecks, the sea drew all light into itself. And yet there was movement there; Smoke thought he saw the ghostly figures of men and women running in slow motion through streets where flame unfurled . . . and this phantasm passed, replaced by the marching of a great army, an army of men in mirrored helmets, their faces hidden in circles of opacity—

Someone was speaking to him. Had been speaking to him for a while. He knew it, just that suddenly. “Smoke! Open your ears!” It was Steinfeld.

“Maybe ’e’ deaf,” Willow suggested sincerely, “from the shells. I lost some of me ’earing when they was shellin’.”

Smoke turned, and Richard Pryor flapped against the sudden motion. “I was thinking, is all,” Smoke said.

“You were daydreaming.” Steinfeld said. “Best not to show a light.”

Smoke closed the blacked-out windows, locked them in place at the bottom.

“And come over here, Smoke. You can hold on to your independence, if you want to keep up the pretense, but I want you to contribute to this.”

Smoke nodded, feeling claustrophobic, cheeks and nose tingling in the warmth of the sun-charged heater glowing cherries of red light to his left. The room was rectangular, high-ceilinged—once someone’s bedroom. Now the main furnishings were a blond-wood desk, one leg missing, that corner supported by stacked bricks, a few cracked wooden chairs, and a wooden crate. There were two pools of light, at each end of the room—a reddish pool from the heater and a yellow one from Steinfeld’s lantern, on a dented cabinet behind his desk. Hard-Eyes and Jenkins leaned against the wall to the right of the desk. They stood there, Smoke guessed, to be near the door and so no one could get behind them. And for the first time he wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing Hard-Eyes here. Hard-Eyes was almost unreadable. The nickel-plated hunting rifle glinted like a frozen lightning bolt in his hands. Jenkins, rifle in hand, bulked beside him, the thundercloud.