A Song Called Youth (81 page)

The president’s scowl vanished; she actually laughed out loud.

Then she became grave once more. “Possibly I will be granted some power of control over the media, by Congress—there is precedent, after all, in World War Two the media was more controlled than people know—and in the Iraq War media access was strictly controlled. And we
are
at war. If I’m granted the powers to control the media, I’ll use them, and once I have them, I see no reason to have to relinquish them. But in order to establish police control, we’ll need coordination with your . . . ” Garble. “ . . . not sure of the timetable. In the meantime we’ll eliminate . . . ” Garble.

Smoke froze the image again. “It’ll shake things, and nicely.”

“Your people deserve the credit, really,” Witcher said

“How many meetings did he have with Bester?” Smoke asked suddenly.

“Four, over two months. We’ve got proof of them all. This is the only one with dialogue, the others were indoors and were very top secret.”

“Our writers in the media will ask,
‘Why is the president meeting this man in secret?’
to start—and then we’ll reveal the latest, the dialogue . . . ”

“Yes, that’ll work, I think.”

An undercurrent in something Witcher had said began to tug at Smoke. He looked at the older man. “ ‘Your people,’ you said. ‘The NR,’ you said. You don’t think of yourself as NR. Is that snobbism because so many of us are technicki?” Smiling to defuse the implied criticism. “Or because you think of them as a . . . as a tool?”

Witcher shrugged. His lips pursed. The faint narrowing of his eyes, the way his hands tucked into his pockets as if to force concealment and control on them, indicated one of his little bursts of paranoia coming on. “I just can’t see any reason to keep up this prying into my motives, Smoke. Don’t look a goddamn gift horse in its dentures.”

He turned and walked out, banging the screen door behind him.

The crow squawked softly, as if to reproach Smoke. “You’re right,” Smoke muttered. “I’ve been unsubtle.”

But he thought he began to see, almost intuitively, why Witcher funded the New Resistance: The Second Alliance’s political plans were in Witcher’s way.

It seemed Witcher had his own plans for the world.

The Space Colony, Security.

When the SA bulls came to his quarters, it was officially three in the morning, and Russ was lying in bed, wide awake, arguing with himself about sedatives.
You start using them, you could get dependent on them,
he told himself. To which he replied,
That’s your tight-assed Southern Baptist upbringing. Hell, give yourself a break.

And then the chime, and he’d answered the door, found the bulls there.

So they’ve come for me,
he thought wearily.
It’s my turn.

But one of them said, “Sorry to wake you, sir. Chairman Praeger would like you to come to an emergency meeting of the council.”

Not fully awake yet, Russ started to ask why they hadn’t simply used the screens, and then he remembered that the screens were down because the Face was still thrusting itself onto them.

“Okay,” he said. Not as relieved as he should have been that he wasn’t being arrested.

He printed out a preset suit, put it on still warm, and followed them to the council room.

They were sitting at the conference table, which was shaped like a backward S; the room was lit thoroughly but softly, from nowhere apparent. Praeger sat in the center, Judith Van Kips beside him as always; beside her was Dr. Tate, the Colony’s chief psychiatrist. Even Tate looked tired, despite his rebuilt, unnaturally regular features, his surgical affectation of youth, some of his true age showing through the mask of a thirty-five-year-old.

Ganzio, the Brazilian, sat across from Van Kips. He was a slim, black-eyed man with a pencil-thin mustache and a penchant for gaudy real-cloth suits, and now (yes, even at three in the morning!), he was resplendent in a double-breasted suit of sky blue, with blue-trimmed ruffles. He tugged on his lapels to straighten the lines of his suit, glancing at the camera, near the ceiling, that was supposed to be recording all the council meetings for the Colony’s appraisal. He was unaware that Praeger had long ago had the camera disconnected.

Messer-Krellman, the technicki’s union rep—nontechnicki himself and generally regarded as the Boss’s lickspittle—sat to Ganzio’s right. He was a ferret-faced man with an air of boredom.

There was much talk around the table as Russ opened the door. When he came in, the talk died out. They all looked at him, smiling in polite welcome.

Russ remembered the meetings with Professor Rimpler and his daughter, Claire, and how subtly at first, and then more and more clearly, the Rimplers had been excluded from the diffuse cronyism that characterized Admin’s inner circle. Russ, then, had been one of that charmed circle. Now he felt the chill. He was officially, to an extent functionally, still part of the council. But in fact, he was on his way to becoming an outsider.

Feeling a queasy combination of fatigue and wired anxiety, Russ took his seat on Ganzio’s left, asking, “Anyone going to clue me in on why this graveyard shift was necessary?” There was a pot of ersatz coffee on the table, and Styrofoam cups. Russ poured himself some, sipped it, regretted it.

“We have had the results of the comm system and LSS analysis,” Praeger said, sighing the words, “and we’ve been forced to conclude that . . . ” He hesitated, folded his hands on the table, stared at them for a moment. Van Kips looked at him questioningly. He went on, “That the majority of the recent sabotage and the comm system imagery interference has not been caused by radic involvement. Has, in fact, somehow been induced by Rimpler himself.”

Russ felt sweat start out on his palms.

So now it was said. What everyone had been trying not to think.

And no one actually said, out loud:
But Rimpler is dead!

“Evidently,” Praeger went on with a weary dryness, “there’s some sort of . . . ” He glanced questioningly at Dr. Tate.

Tate shifted uncomfortably in his seat and said, “It’s a sort of psyche-gestalt presence maintaining the dynamics of Rimpler’s personality despite the fact that we, uh, technically cut his personality away when we removed a large part of the brain tissue we’re using to direct some of the electronics. We can only speculate, at this point, about what psychic mechanism has been engaged. But I’m fairly sure some rather base, almost infantile portion of Rimpler’s personality has survived as a kind of subtle electromagnetic field, which, by a sort of, ah, cyber-telekinesis, seems to be exerting its influence over the contiguous LSS computer control systems. The, ah, ghost in the machine, as it were . . . ”

“Holy shit,” Russ breathed.

“Yes,” Praeger said. “We’ve accrued enough parts to replace the life-support computer system without using cerebro-interfacing. We can . . . dispose of Rimpler’s brain. But we’re not sure we can get to it. We sent some people in to try to shut him down—he overrode the door sensors, locked our people out. Rimpler seems to have accessed computer security systems. He’s been opening and closing the detention cells at random, for example. The guards have kept the prisoners in place but . . . ” He shrugged. “Obviously, if he can do that, and if he’s truly aware of us—as he seems to be—he can block our access to the LSS using its security backup systems. Electrification, paralysis gas—even drawing the air from the access corridors.”

Russ swallowed. “And you want me to find a safe way through.”

“You’re the Security specialist, and you know the Sec systems like no one else.”

Russ looked from face to face, repressing an urge to shout at them. He stared at their emptied coffee cups. “You were having the meeting long before I got here. You didn’t bring me into it until you had to.”

“This is no time to harp on esoteric rules of procedure,” Van Kips said sharply. “This is an emergency. Can you help us with it or not?”

Russ thought,
I’m more on the outside than I thought.
It seemed Praeger had decided he was a radic sympathizer—and therefore expendable. In that case, with all the usual irony that attends politics, he’d have to be a radic sympathizer to survive.
No more putting it off. I’ll have to make my move. Soon.

He rubbed his damp palms on his soft paper trousers. Then, annoyed at himself, he looked down and saw that the sweat had blackened his palm with print-dye. “I’m not sure I can be of much help. Seems to me, if we try to blowtorch into the place, he may retaliate by opening air locks here and there.”

Everyone reacted. Sharp intakes of breath, faces going pale, eyes staring as they imagined it. The Colony’s nightmare. The void, the cold vacuum, always waiting outside . . . 

“There might be one way,” Russ said slowly. “Shut down power around the Colony except for battery-survival minimum for each section. While the main power lines are shut down, Rimpler can’t control the doors, air locks, anything. We can waltz in and shut him down easily.”

“Battery-survival minimum doesn’t provide for Security or for comm systems,” Van Kips said in her most brittle tone.

Praeger nodded his agreement. “Judith is quite right. We would be unable to seal off Admin with any effectiveness, unable to communicate with the Security Forces, and unable to maintain surveillance in the technicki dorms. It would be the ideal time to mount another rebellion. We’d be all but helpless.”

Russ snorted. “We’d still have most of the weapons, the armor, the trained guards!”

“It’s not enough,” Praeger insisted. “We’re too badly outnumbered. No. Absolutely not. We can’t risk dropping Security envelope. We’ll have to find another way in.”

Russ took a long, slow breath. He exhaled it even more slowly. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll try. I’ll play it by ear, see what we’ve got, try to break in. But if he . . . ”

Tate put in, “In my opinion, he thinks of the Colony as part of himself. He
has
gone mad—he seems to be willing to be, in a way, deliberately incontinent, to foul and mutilate himself. But he won’t kill himself.”

“You’d better be right, Tate,” Russ said.

Kitty sat uncomfortably on the stone bench under the Monument, in the Open, looking up through the branches of the eucalyptus trees, smelling their menthol fragrance, wondering if she was being set up in some way.

She looked up at the statue. The Monument—a man in a pressure suit, sans helmet—created by an artist using a 3D printer, memorialized the EVA workers killed working outside the Colony. They were almost forgotten now. And the hypocrites would have to put up another monument for RM17.

The statue’s arm was raised, hand outreaching, his face exaggeratedly expressive of awestruck yearning for the stars. Bogus, Lester would say.

It was “noon,” so the mirrors and filters at the Open’s enormous circular windows, at both ends, diffused the park with a homogenous golden sunlight. The air here would have made a visitor from Earth gag, but to Kitty it smelled clean, after the dorms and the corridors. The Colony was choking itself; it was an organism whose liver and kidneys were failing, whose lungs were too clogged to filter out poisons. The foul air seemed fouler in the background of social tension: the persistent rumors about RM17; the latest cuts in food rations; the arrests. And the vandalism—the insane old man’s face that came and went on the comm system; the power failures and burst pipes.

She saw Russ coming a hundred yards away, cutting across the soccer field that no one was allowed to use at the moment—public gatherings of more than three were forbidden until Admin saw fit to lift the state of emergency—and she felt like running.

How could she trust the Chief of Security?

But Chu had surprised her. “Go see him,” she’d said. “There are strong indications he’s on the outs with Admin’s Council. He’s had several conflicts with them. The danger is, maybe he wants to flush us out through you, to regain their favor. But I have studied the man, and I don’t believe this is the case. He may be our best hope.”

She got to her feet, but it was too late to run. “Hello, Kitty,” Russ said, smiling wearily. He stepped onto the path and stood there awkwardly, hands in pockets, looking at his shoes, so she almost laughed at his “aw-shucks” posture. But then she realized he was staring at the grass stuck to his shoes. It was dried, yellowed. “Grass is dying out there,” he said. “They watered it this morning, looks like, but it maybe came too late. Maybe not pure enough water.” He looked up at her. “How you getting on?”

“Okay.” Then she shook her head. “No . . . not okay.”

He nodded and moved toward the bench. “Let’s sit down, talk.”

“Not there.” (Chu had advised her.) “I prefer to walk.”

He smiled sadly. “You think the bench is bugged? I could be wearing a bug, for that matter. But hell, let’s walk.”

They strolled down the path toward the Admin housing project. “Here’s the story,” he said in just above a whisper. “The Colony can’t go on this way. If we leave things the way they are, it’ll get worse before it gets better. There’s something happening here I couldn’t even describe to you . . . You’d think I was making it up. But it means that Admin is distracted now . . . and that could help. Now I’ll tell you something about RM17. You’re right about it. I trust you, Kitty. I don’t even know why. I do, though. I don’t trust the other radics. Maybe I trust you because the way I read you—I could be wrong—you aren’t politically motivated, not really. You just want decent treatment, a fair chance. So you’re not a radic, per se—I know your husband is, but . . . the way I see it, you’re a person willing to fight, but you don’t have any axes to grind ideologically.”

She wasn’t following him. “What about getting Lester out?”

“Sure, well, I’m comin’ to it.” He glanced around. “I fooled with the surveillance cameras, reassigned the guards out here, but all this open ground still makes me nervous. Damn, it looks empty. Seems a shame.”

“Hard to get permission to come out here lately. Kids are getting stir-crazy.”

“I know. That’ll change, too, if . . . okay, listen. What we’re going to have to do is to organize a counterforce, our own security outfit, and disarm the one that exists. But I’m going to need commitment from the technicki underground that they’ll coordinate with me. Move where I say, when I say. If they’ll do it, we’ll pull the rug out from under Admin. You’ll be my liaison with the underground. That way I don’t know who they are, so they aren’t threatened. The thing will happen in stages . . . You look like all this’s thrown you a bit.”