John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Karakos’s stomach lurched.

“I brought you here,” Watson said, “to prepare the ground for you in some way. Or to prepare the ground in you. The extractor will change you, yes. We will erase you, rebuild you from the ground up—but simply chemically installing a new mind-set in a man doesn’t seem adequate to me. I felt you needed to be prepared. I feel that somewhere in you there’s a seed of genetic purity that resonates with the beauty of what’s happening here—a beauty that emerges from truth.”

“You’re preparing me… mystically?”

“Spiritually, perhaps.” Some of the edge had left Watson. “I… always felt you were rather wasted on the other side. I suppose I wanted to try to convert you the ordinary way first.” He shrugged. “Strange impulses arise in one from time to time.” He looked down at the pens. “Ah. The fourth stage. Have a look, Karakos.”

Karakos forced himself to look. Till now, afraid of his own anger, he’d tried not to look at the pens too closely. Now, he saw the prisoners squatting in groups, held nearly motionless by the weight of misery. Saw that the privileged detainees had clothing; the others were humiliated by being kept naked and shivering with cold. Saw them huddled for warmth and rocking on their heels, mothers clasping listless infants. Some of the younger men seemed to have gone into the gray blankness of simple despair; others were looking around with a maddening repetitiveness: Look first this way, see the fence, the locked gate, the guards, the wire; look that way, see another fence, wire, guards; look another way, see the wall, the opaque window behind which they knew more of their captors watched them; turn, look behind, and see the fence, the guards, the walls. Start over again: see the fence, the locked gate, the guards, the wire… No matter how many times you looked, it was still the same.

Even from here, Karakos could see the marks of malnutrition on the unprivileged prisoners; the distended bellies, the sores, the dullness in their faces. But all of them, from time to time, glared sullenly at the other pens.

The gate opened, four SA guards strolled into the non-privileged pens, picked out prisoners at random, and began to beat them. “And, of course,” Karakos said, his voice just a croak now, “those in the privileged pens are not usually beaten.”

The prisoners were cringing, running, clawing at one another to get out of the way as the guards swung cattle prods and Recoil Reversal sticks.

“You begin to see,” Cooper remarked, “how very animalistic the prisoners are. They revert so easily.”

“Animalistic?” Karakos could not believe it. He fought himself, feeling the dull throb of hatred inflame and squirt searing bile in him. He wanted to lunge at Cooper.

But he didn’t move. It was as if he stood balanced on the tip of a flagpole. He didn’t dare to move. He simply stood at the window, trembling, sweat running into his eyes, as Cooper spoke into a microphone, ordering the guards; and as the guards opened the gates between the pens.

As pens eleven and twelve were opened onto number ten.

The guards withdrew from the area. None could be seen from the pens.

Slowly the larger group, made up of the prisoners in eleven and twelve, began to move toward the frightened, huddled blacks in ten.

It began gradually. But in ten minutes the fighting had begun, and in fifteen minutes four, perhaps five, of the blacks had been beaten to death by the prisoners from the other cages.

Karakos was choking, gagging. Not with squeamishness—he was beyond that—but with undirected rage at the way these people had been shorn of their humanity, twisted into new shapes; all the hunched shapes of brutality.

“I think we have room forty-four set up for Jean-Michel, don’t we?” Watson said, speaking into a fone he’d taken from his belt. “Good.”

I have to make them kill me, Karakos thought. Or they’re going to use me and I’ll be part of this.

This—the men tearing other men to pieces below. And women. And children.

He could no longer contain himself. He slipped from the flagpole, turned toward the guard, and, forgetting his cuffs, tried to raise his fists against the man and screamed in frustration when the shackles restrained him—and something bit him on the arm. He looked, saw that Cooper had given him an injection. He had time to think, They’re going to use me. And to feel the horror that followed on that thought, before all thinking was eclipsed and the darkness was complete.

“So what did Unger say?” Howie asked.

Stoner shrugged. “Not much—just something ambiguous about how things are ‘hopping’ and ‘we’re all gonna have to watch our step, you read me, Kimosabe?’”

Howie laughed.

The two CIA career men were in a bar in Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. It was not a fashionable bar. It had a twentieth century jukebox, its music the umpteenth reissue of Patsy Cline or George Jones, twentieth-century country music instead of Minimono or chaotics or ska-thud or angst rock. The floor was wood instead of concrete or plastipress, and it sagged in places with age. The bar stools weren’t confoam; they were torn, taped-up vinyl. There was a mirror behind the bar instead of a vidflasher.

Howie and Stoner were sitting in a scarred wooden booth drinking Lone Star beer, imported from Texas, and talking shop. They were almost the only people in the bar, except for a barfly on a stool at the far end talking to the bleached blond barmaid, and a snoring fat man four booths away. It was eight p.m., and Stoner was tired from work—but at the same time he was wired on a nagging anxiety that never quite articulated itself.

Howie was a barrel-chested black man of fifty, wearing halfglasses and four gold rings on his left hand. An enormous white cowboy hat was tilted back on his head—he’d worn it as a joke, because Stoner was a country-music fan. Howie’s right eye was electronic, an implant; it moved a little differently than the other, but it was fairly realistic. They’d even traced fake veins on the corner of the white. When you looked at the iris closely, you could see the overlapping sections of its shutter closing.

“Unger came into AD this morning,” Howie said. Once a field agent, Howie now worked in the CIA Domestic’s Accounting and Disbursements office. “Said he had a special project needed funding and the director was unavailable, could he talk to our supervisor? What the hell, he thinks Fench is going to give him money without top-off approval? Man’s crazy.” There was something more than office-gossipy derision in Howie’s voice; something personal, even sullen.

“All he wanted from me—in a material way—was the Kupperbind file,” Stoner said, watching Howie’s face.

“Was that all.” Flat like that. No question mark.

“And he mentioned you.”

Howie had been staring at a moth-eaten elk’s head over the bar. Now his eyes jerked back to focus on Stoner; the artificial one took a micro-moment longer to line up with the other.

“How’s that implanted eye treating you, Howie?”

“Okay. I had some ghost-image problems with it. It picked up some TV station, I was seeing football players running through my office. And one of those AntiViolence executions, some guy getting his head blown open in front of a studio audience… I saw that while I was in the fucking cafeteria trying to eat my dinner. Blew away my appetite. Had to get my eye reinsulated. What’d Unger say about me, goddammit?”

“He said he heard you were a good buddy of mine. I said yeah. He said, ‘Alignment is everything, Stoner.’ I said, ‘Huh?’ and he said, ‘You should be careful who you pick to be your friends, Kimosabe. Pick people who’re on their way up.’” Stoner waited for Howie’s reaction. Howie just sat there, looking leaden, motionless, staring at his beer bottle. “What is it with you and him, Howie? What the hell was he talking about?”