A Song Called Youth (80 page)

She knew she meant something to Torrence. And she seemed to have answered some deep need in Karakos (wondering with a vague unease, Was Karakos manipulating her, as Torrence implied? His emotional openness was almost too good to be true). But when you got involved with men, you became absurd. Unimportant things seemed significant; you became stupidly
girlish.
It was embarrassing. It was beneath her. Sexism was unfashionable with men like Dan Torrence—and Karakos. But somehow it was alive and well in them. As soon as you became involved with men, regardless of the best intentions of both sides, you became subsumed to them. Co-opted.

Still . . . the tension in her, the sense that she should be doing something to make up for abandoning her father, was maddening. And sex was an effective release from it.

She looked at Lila, the twilight’s gloom making her dark skin look, in profile, like a black velvet cutout. She was laying her reassembled gun aside, wiping oil off her hands. Carefully not looking at Claire.

“You never seem to get rattled, Lila,” Claire said on impulse. “You never seem to need to . . . to get drunk like the others sometimes do, or . . . I mean, even Steinfeld needs to get drunk about once a month. You never get drunk, never get involved with men. You don’t . . . ” She shrugged. “How do you do it?”

“There’s something I do,” Lila said, looking uncomfortable.

Claire was embarrassed. Afraid the woman was about to confess that she was in love with someone, like Steinfeld; that she masturbated wildly and fantasized about him.

“This is what I do,” Lila said. She took a little brass pipe from a pocket on her fatigues, and a piece of tinfoil. “But only once a month—that’s all I allow myself. To, um,
let go,
no? I find it does not impair my efficiency the next day so much as, um, getting drunk.”

“What is it?” Claire asked.

Lila was opening the foil. Inside was a little brown lump of hardened mud. Or something that looked like it. Lila glanced at the door, as if to be sure that it was closed, and said softly, “It is hashish.”

“Oh!” She’d read about it. “It’s carcinogenic, isn’t it? Lung cancer.”

Lila smiled. “Perhaps this is so if you smoke it every day. Once a month it’s much less risky than breathing the air in a city. And I only allow it to myself once a month.” She broke a piece of the hash off, rolled it into a taffy lump, and pressed it onto the screen in the little brass pipe. She put the pipe in her mouth, gripped between her straight white teeth. She took a steel-gray New-Soviet cigarette lighter from her pocket and ran the flame over the hash, sucked on the pipe, making the tarry lump bubble and glow. The coal lit her face with a fan of soft red light. The blue-white smoke drifting up from the pipe was aromatic.

Claire was only a little short of amazed. Lila, a drug user!

Lila inhaled, held the smoke for a moment, then let it gush out and said, her eyes faintly sleepy now, “It’s a very mild hashish.” And she offered the pipe to Claire.

“Oh, um, no thanks.”

“A guerrilla has to know the world from every—how would you say—
from every window. From every direction. This will show you a new . . . ”

“A new angle on things?” Claire smiled.

“You have been so tense. I’ve seen that. This will help.”

Claire found herself accepting the pipe. The guerrillas sometimes smiled at things Claire said, as if they thought her just a little ridiculous. As if she were a naif because she’d lived most of her life in the Colony. She didn’t want Lila to think of her that way.

But her stomach contracted with fear as she put the pipe in her mouth. Would she hallucinate? Would she think she’d turned into a sea gull and try to fly from the window and fall to her death?

She inhaled. “I don’t think it’s affecting me.”

Lila giggled. “You inhaled before it was lit. I have to light again. Put it in your mouth . . . yes, hold it still . . . good . . . now suck on it to inhale . . . good, inhale . . . ”

Claire felt a hot sandpaper hand jab sharp fingers into her lungs, and she gagged, coughed, almost dropping the pipe. Lila was making a strange sound. Something like
tee hee.
Astonishing!

“Well, I am guessing you got some that time, Claire. Beautiful Claire. Now I will have some more . . . ”

Lila took another puff. A long one. She didn’t cough.

Claire felt pleasantly distant from things, mentally. But physically she could feel the window seat’s cushions under her; the fabric of her robe under her hand; air currents sliding cool past her throat.

Her lungs still burned from the first hit of the hashish, but she found herself wanting another.

They traded the pipe back and forth twice more, Claire coughing both times but caring less with each lungful of the hot, dark fragrance.

“It smells like incense,” she said dreamily. “But a little more . . . a little edge to it . . . ”

“It makes me sleepy,” Lila said, “but not like I want to really sleep. Just to lay down and dream but with my eyes open.”

“You mean . . . you hallucinate?”

“No, not that kind of dreaming. My mind goes wherever it wants.”

She walked to the bed with an odd combination of floaty grace and stoned dislocation. With a soft cry she sank onto it, began to undress.

Claire stared at her, thinking she should leave. Lila was going to sleep, or wanted privacy to lie there and dream. But it was so fascinating to watch her peel her clothes off. She’d never realized before what odd things clothes are, what peculiar, soft encrustations they were. And Lila was so slender, smooth; watching her limbs move was like watching the flow of a dark river at night; just enough moonlight on the river to make out the contours of currents and ripples.

“You’re so beautiful,” she blurted.

A flash of white teeth in the near darkness. “Come and talk to me, Claire.”

“I should . . . let you sleep, or . . . ”

“I’m sad, Claire. I get sad when I smoke hash sometimes. Please don’t leave. Come and talk to me.” She was a woman-shaped pool of soft-edged shadow on the silvery silk bed. The bed didn’t look like a bed; it seemed like a sort of great soft cake, as if you could reach out and push your hand into it and scoop moist chunks of bedcake.

Claire stood, swayed with a momentary dizziness, then walked toward the bed. It took so long to get there.

But in a moment she was lying on the great rectangular cake beside Lila, lying on her back, her robe fallen open, feeling the cool air whisper over her skin, one of the currents warm as it cupped her left breast and drew on her nipple, stiffening it.

Oh: It was Lila’s mouth . . . 

Claire stared at Lila’s dark head moving on her chest, her large, lustrous eyes looking up at her . . . felt a connection, a bolt of wet lightning between her breast and her vagina. The electric wetness emerging there so she could feel the lubricants cooling in the slit where they met the air.

There was a glass pane of resistance in her, telling her:
This is perverse, this is a bad idea, shouldn’t get involved like this because Lila will get attached and I’m not gay (am I?), and anyway, Dan will freak out . . . 

But the tide of sheer yearning rose up in her and pushed mightily at the glass pane, which turned out to be ice because it didn’t break but melted in warm, salty sensation. As Lila slithered onto her, pressed succulently large lips over hers, ground her pubis onto Claire’s—not too hard, the way a man will when he’s clumsily trying to turn a woman on, but with firm tenderness and a suggestion of suction so that labia sucked on labia. They rocked together, and Claire basked in the ecstatic surprise of heightened sensory input as she drank Lila’s skin with her own, letting her hands skate the impossibly perfect engineering of the feminine curvaceousness of Lila’s back, the supple fullness of Lila’s ass. With her eyes shut, she seemed to see what she felt, a synesthesia of tactile sensations translated into the visual, Lila’s elegant arcs abstracted into swirls of ruby mist and exquisite ellipses of mouse-fur gray. Their tongues, entwined, were translucent, comma-shaped bubbles that became one another and then writhed happily apart and came together again with impudent stickiness . . . 

A fulsome ache came into her stomach. Lowering itself into her groin.

As if sensing the ache’s arrival, Lila moved off her—a sense of fleeting tragedy; wash of sweet, cool air—and knelt beside her, exploring with her fingers, chasing hot fish of sensation up from their dark caves. And then dipping to meet them with her mouth.

Oh,
Claire thought,
no. I couldn’t do that.

Lila didn’t insist. But after a while Claire found herself turning onto her side, pressing her head between Lila’s smooth thighs, probing for the wet, warm place between the petal-shapes of wool. And after a time, a gong shivered, shivered, shivered . . . 

It seemed like years later but it had been only an hour when the door opened and someone stood there, backlit in the yellow hall light.

Lila and Claire had rested. They had just begun again. Somewhere, sometime, they’d had another pipeful. And they’d begun kissing again, exploring each other’s breasts with the satisfying slowness of the utterly relaxed.

And then someone had opened the door. Claire looked over. It was Dan. Hard-Eyes. Torrence. Staring.

Staring like he couldn’t believe it had happened to him twice. And maybe because he couldn’t believe it was Lila this time.

“How many times,” Claire murmured vaguely, “is he going to walk in on me with people? This is ridiculous. Doesn’t anyone
knock
in this place?” She sank back on the bed, giggling.

After a moment Torrence closed the door and they heard his footsteps recede.

“Poor Torrence,” Claire said. Suddenly feeling cosmically sad for him.

Lila comforted her.

• 11 •

Merino, somewhere in the Caribbean.

“The files Stoner turned over are essentially the stuff of allegations,” Witcher said. “It’s useful though. It’ll help. Of course, the CIA can claim we fabricated the files. But
this”
—he tapped the screen—“this they can’t deny.”

“They can claim it was computer-generated,” Smoke said. “But we can provide video for independent analysts. They’ll analyze it and see it wasn’t computer-fabricated, prove it’s authentic. Along with the general impact of Kessler’s propaganda spotters and the stuff Stoner gave us, it should wake up the media.”

“Like a beehive in their beds,” Witcher agreed. “That is—the media the SA doesn’t control . . . ”

Smoke and Witcher were in the briefing room, standing together at the blackboard-size instruction screen. It was a cool night on Merino, almost eleven p.m., but the island was quite awake. They could hear the clank of rifles on buckles as sentries walked by to relieve the guards at the rear fence. Mosquitoes whined in bloodthirsty frustration at the window screen. From the distance came the dulled thud and blurred chant of music as someone got in their R and R.

Smoke wondered what it was like to relax at a party and, well, to
dance.
To laugh and slap friends on the back and dance and feel at one with a party without trying. He’d never been able to do that sort of thing, and he envied it. He thought about Alouette, sleeping now, and he missed her.

His mind swerved hastily back to priorities. He turned to look again at the screen; the crow, on his shoulder, made a raspy caw and fluttered his wings at the motion. Smoke and the crow gazed thoughtfully at the stilled image on the big, inch-thin videomonitor.

It was an image of the president of the United States. President Anna Bester, America’s own Maggie Thatcher, out in a snowy field, in tan overcoat, brown pantsuit, and high gold rubber boots, walking with a fat man in a tentlike white mackintosh; she was talking earnestly to him. The president had none of her usual charismatic composure, was missing her look of it’s-all-under-control-and-I’m-sanguine-about-the-future-despite-the-gravity-of-the-situation. She was scowling. The scowl showing the lines of her late middle age in spite of her face-lift.

The fat man was Sackville-West, Head of Security for the Second Alliance International Security Corporation. The SA’s Head Inquisitor, Witcher called him.

Witcher hit the button, and the vid began to play again; as if responding to a choreographer, the president and Sackville-West began to move, walking in matched stride. The image was a little unstable; it drew back for a wider angle that took in two Secret Service men, expressionless and wearing shades as they had for generations—old-fashioned dark glasses had become their totem of office, like the archaic costume of a British Beefeater.

“It’s amazing they didn’t spot the bird’s eye,” Smoke said. The crow made a creaking sound in its throat, as if in agreement.

Witcher spread his hands and put on a comical expression of false modesty. “My outfit makes the best surveillance equipment on the planet. And on the Colony. Anyway, the sky was with us, the cloudy backdrop, the diminished light, not much reflection. The surveillance bird is treated with something we call chameleon spackle, blends in with the backdrop. Also, the snowfield dazzled them some. And we were simply lucky. For example, the two Secret Servicemen were watching the woods almost exclusively. They were thinking assassins, because she was so out in the open, not surveillance. They really have become embarrassingly incompetent lately. It’s a national scandal.”

Witcher rewound the video a little and turned up the volume. They heard bits and pieces of the conversation, perhaps forty percent of it.

“Shame about the sound,” Witcher said. “They spoke softly. There was noise from the wind and boots in the snow.”

“There’s enough,” Smoke said.

As they heard Sackville-West say, “Madame, the Fourth Estate, to put it bluntly, is the enemy of this enterprise. The media must be kept under strict rein. We . . . ” Garble. “If the Emergency Powers are . . . ” Garble. “ . . . intolerable situation unless we take strict . . . ” Garble. “ . . . bottom line is this, Madame: To paraphrase Pastor Crandall, ‘In order to take control, one must first take control!’ ”