John Shirley: A Song Called Youth

Spengle said, “Ms. Rimpler, we’ll have link-up in a minute or two. In the meantime—”

He looked at the gawking assemblage of children. “I heard someone up here has refused to go back to the dorms.”

“Anthony!” they chorused. “Z’Anthony!”

Claire said, “That’s something you must already know, Spengle, since your people—”

Anthony interrupted her by stepping up to Spengle, half turning so the camera could pick him up clearly. He’d been drilled well.

A finger-sized directional mike on the bottom of the camera swiveled back and forth between Spengle and Anthony as they spoke.

“We’ve got live,” the cameraman said, pressing the earplug of his headset.

Spengle nodded, repeated his earlier spiel, and bent to interview Anthony. From technicki:

“Your name is Anthony Fiorello?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re one of the children refusing to go back to the dorms?”

“There’s only one refusing!” Claire broke in. Spengle ignored her. And probably it didn’t pick up on the mike.

“Why is that, Anthony?”

“It’s crowded there and it smells bad and I’m just as good as Admin people, so how come I can’t live in the Central with the parks where it’s nice like the Admins?” Just a touch mechanical, hinting at rote.

“Anthony—how many people live in Colony? Do you know?”

“Sure, we learned that. About ten thousand people.”

“And how many live in Central in the nice dorms, or in the Open out of all that?”

“One thousand.”

“Does anything else bother you about all this, Anthony?”

“Well, I came out here and it looks so empty! There’s some houses down there, but they’re a long way away! There’s room here for technics and maintens!”

Claire was fed up. “You want to interview me, it’s got to be now. I’m due back at Admin,” she called out. “Come on, kids!” She turned to the others. “Get your things together; we’re going to have to go soon.” Some of them stirred, others stood unmoving, gaping at the cameraman, mesmerized by the technological totem on his shoulder. The reporters, she realized, had usurped her authority over the children. And that was a bad omen.

“Ms. Rimpler,” Spengle said, “has just said she hasn’t got time to talk with us.” Heavy sarcastic emphasis on hasn’t got time. “So we’ll have to go back to you, Ben, at TechniWave Central—”

“It isn’t true!” Claire shouted, rushing up to the camera. “That’s not what I said!—” And then she stopped talking, just stopped, feeling foolish, realizing the light was out on the camera, that it was no longer transmitting and hadn’t been for a while.

And Spengle had turned his back to her, was walking away in close, soft conversation with the flatsuiter…

Half an hour later Claire stood alone on the platform of the park railstop, watching the car that had come along the axis rail-line to take the children back to the dorms; watching it recede as it carried the children to the north end of the Colony, the dorms and the uncompleted area, while she waited for the train that would take her to the arbitrary south. Hating the glaring symbolism of the moment, she chewed a thumbnail, thinking that once the camera was gone, Anthony had lost interest in boycotting the dorms. He was first on the train, eager for the arcades.

She’d crossed to the southward station and stood looking toward the huge retina-like windows above Admin central. A ring of verdant green encircled the windows. Within the ring, mist curled in gentle spirals, refracting the light in muted rainbows. It was quiet in the parkland; there was a gentle, manufactured breeze smelling of growing things—and only faintly of air filterant—and for a moment the place looked like the paradise it had been designed to be. But then the vent-breeze shifted and she caught the soiled-socks odor of the dorms’ overworked air recycler. And the paradise was gone. Paradise has always been fragile.

“Japanese tourists,” Samson Molt said, “never change. The Japanese keep their traditions. Their tea rituals. Their sushi schools and their chopsticks and that Japanese packaging. And the way they act in foreign places is always the same. Since I was a boy, they never changed. They’re faddish in some ways—but really, they never change. Could almost be the same tour group I saw in New York as a lad.”

Samson Molt and Joe Bonham were lounging at an “outdoor table” at the south end of the arcade. The six clubs, two digital arcades, a handful of boutiques, and two cafés were “the Strip,” which was the closest thing the Colony had to authorized nightlife. Molt and Bonham preferred the unauthorized nightlife. But that didn’t start for hours yet, end of the third shift, when the maximum number of B-section workers would be freed up to spend cred.

The tourists were eight nearly identical (to Molt’s eyes) Japanese with the faddish forehead-strapped cameras, each camera with its remote focuser that snapped down over the right eye, transforming the socket into something reptilian. They wore onepiece Japanese Action Suits, JAS for short, in tastefully splashy pastels, soft material. They chattered and pointed, winking to make the headband cams take pictures. Each stop along the arcade was an orgy of you-take-my-picture-and-I’ll-take-yours, posing in front of everything, so that half of what they were photographing was blocked by their bodies.

Molt wondered which ones were industrial spies. The Japanese were said to be planning their own space colony.

Their guide was a tall, demure black woman making a valiant effort to look interested as she droned, “…the Colony took twenty-four years to achieve basic livability for non-astronaut personnel…” drone “…begun in secret early in this century… Richard Branson was an…” drone “…now owned by UNIC, the United Nations Industrial Council, five major international corporations who pooled their resources for matching funds from the UN…” drone “…The Colony manufactures goods which can only be made in zero or light gravity, as well as operating the first of a chain of interplanetary solar power stations which soak up solar energy and transform it to microwaves transmitted to receptors in the Gobi and Mojave deserts…” drone “Although UNIC is still operating in the red, it expects to break even next year and to begin a profit-making phase in the following year… We begin our tour at the arcade because it links Tourist Arrival with Colony Open, the parkland area which as you will see in just a moment verges on the paradisial in its…” Drone.

The tourists clicked and snapped and chattered on, and the Strip was itself again, shorn of the kitschy glamor of their enthusiasm. Like most of the Colony corridor areas, the Strip seemed more worn, more used, more frayed and grimy than things on Earth, though it had been built only a few years before. Which surprised visitors. They expected the pristine polish of a top-tech chips clinic. But the Colony was almost a closed system. And replacing anything, repainting anything, was more costly here…

And now the Strip was like a third-generation hand-me-down toy in a grubby nursery, its colors faded or smeared with the grease of too much touching; like a seaside amusement park long since gone to seed.

Across from the French-style Café Crème was the white seashell-shaped metal awning of the Captain Halfgee club. Soft, moving lights glowed behind the mermaids painted on its plastex windows; two customers came out, still dripping chlorinated water, towels draped over their shoulders, carrying drinks in plastic cups.

The “street” of white synthetics was nine yards wide, and dingy; the ceiling, three yards overhead—unusually high for a Colony corridor—was blue, fluffy clouds painted on at intervals. The clouds looked as if they ought to be laundered with bleach.