John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

A bit of scripture popped into his head, Romans 12:20…. if your enemies are hungry, feed them…

But, Russ added to himself, try not to feed them your soul.

Russ was six-foot-two, weighed in at two twenty-five. He wore an Admin sky-blue Security jumpsuit—the color of the original security force’s uniforms, before the SA—and an old-fashioned wristwatch with a watch face and hands. He was middle-aged but boyish-looking, blue-eyed, tanned, seam-faced, and he usually managed a friendly expression. He sat in a compact office, twenty feet by thirty, with the claustrophobic seven and a half feet between floor and ceiling, typical of the Space Colony’s offices; the walls were postered with old Arizona Highways photos of the American Southwest’s deserts and mesas and sunsets. His desk was real walnut—he’d built it himself, having imported the wood over a six-month period a piece at a time—and centered on it was a white plastic computer console.

He wished to God you could smoke on the Colony. Even after all these years…

Russ took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, leaned back in his squeaking swivel chair—he refused to let them oil it, he liked it to squeak—and put his booted feet on the desktop.

He’d just come from his session with Dr. Tate, the Admin chief psychiatrist. Had gone to him about his ulcers, which his physician felt were stress-related. Tate seemed to’ve had a partial rejuv, had his face and back rebuilt, so he looked thirty years younger than his sixty-five—and Russ himself was fifty but Tate seemed paternal somehow, anyway. He’d expertly gotten Russ to talk about himself. Airing the misgivings he’d been having about the job, and how the job conflicted with his religion.

Prompted by Tate, Russ realized that only part of the hatred was real. The part about hating himself. The rest of his feelings about the job, the place, were colored and exaggerated by his self-hatred. Russ Parker was a Christian, and his self-hatred, as Tate had hinted, was rooted in the shame of religious hypocrisy.

That thought came to him while he was looking at the list of names on the computer screen.

Beside the name of each Security Risk he was to interview was a short summary of the interviewee. Ninety percent of them were either black, Jewish, or married to a black or Jewish person. The other ten percent were Marxists or known to be associated in some way with the people who’d fomented the Technicki Rebellion. The list just didn’t make sense—there was no particular correlation between the technicki rebels and race. Only thirty percent of them had been members of a racial minority group. And those weren’t the ringleaders. The issues giving rise to the Technicki Rebellion just weren’t race-related.

The Colony’s new chief administrator was a man named Praeger. The list had been made up by Praeger’s special committee on post-rebellion security measures. And everyone on the committee was, like Praeger, an SA Initiate.

Russ took a deep breath, turned in his swivel chair, and tapped the button that would buzz Administration for video conference. He glanced at his watch. It was three p.m., Colony Time. Praeger should be back from lunch by now.

Praeger’s cybercam image appeared on the upper left-hand screen of the four monitors, two stacked over two, that stood to the left of Russ’s work console. Praeger said, “Hello, Russ, what can I do for you?” Wearing his rimless Coke-bottle glasses, running a hand over his eraser-pink bald head, making an inquisitive cone of his prissy red lips.

Russ controlled his surge of revulsion and said, “Well, now, Bill, I was just looking over the list of Risks, and I just can’t see why most of them are on there. I feel it’s inappropriate to use race as… um…”

“Everyone on the list is there for a good reason,” Praeger said briskly, as if he were impatient with stating the obvious. “The reason doesn’t necessarily show up on the stats attached to the list. Sometimes the reason isn’t provided. Our agents just give us the names, and there are too many names for them to get specific about each one. We want you to interview them and see what you can find out. Look for connections to rebels of course—but, really, anything problematic at all.”

Russ struggled to maintain his mask of serenity. Like nothing rattled him. Objecting mildly, “That doesn’t make sense, either. They know I’m Security Chief. I expect they’re not likely to open up to me. No, sir. And, hell—I don’t know what I’m supposed to be lookin’ for. ”

“Don’t you?” A hint of real annoyance in Praeger’s flat voice now. “Saboteurs, for a start. Who sabotaged the food refrigeration? Who’s been interfering with InterColony TV transmissions? Who’s been freezing up Admin’s elevators?”

“Probably just servicing breakdowns, Bill. We haven’t got the parts—”

“Some of those systems were newly installed.”

“There was no direct evidence that it was sabotage, the way I heard it.”

“Electronics informs me that they think it was done with a power surge, which was deliberately introduced into the systems.”

“I’ve got that report. I see it as a lot of wild digging for excuses to cover up the fact that they can’t find the real problem.”

“They might as well say that the statement you just made is your way of covering up your inability to find the saboteurs.”

There was a tense silence. Then Praeger chuckled, to let Russ know that what he’d just said wasn’t serious. But they both knew it hadn’t been entirely a joke, either.

Behind that chuckle was the slightly veiled implication that Russ’s job might be on the line.

Sure, Russ had come to despise the job. But he was trapped on the Colony till the blockade was lifted. If he resigned, he’d be an object of suspicion. He’d be on the list that was on his computer. He just might be arrested on general principle.

“Maybe you don’t know, Russ—there’ve been reports of unusual activity at Life Support Central,” Praeger said.

“I’ve got that one. Wild changes in power output levels. You think it’s connected to the power surges in the other parts of the Colony?”

“I don’t know. But I want you to see what you can find out about a kind of technicki cult around Professor Rimpler.”

“A what? A cult ?”

Rimpler? Rimpler was dead. Bludgeoned by Samson Molt during the uprising. Rimpler, who’d founded the Colony, had turned against its Admin Committee, had become a rebel sympathizer.

Praeger shrugged. “For people who work every day with state-of-the-art hardware, the technickis are remarkably superstitious. Evidently some of them believe Rimpler’s spirit is haunting the Colony. It could be that this cult around his ‘spirit’ has found out about his, ah, cerebral/cybernetic interface… which is now in place in Life Support Central.”

“Run that ’un by me again there, boss, will ya? About that interface?” Drawling it, making light of it. But Russ was stunned.

Praeger sniffed. “It’s not so unusual. Been done before. When we found his body, it wasn’t quite brain-dead. He was interested in cerebral/cyber interfacing, he had all the equipment here to experiment in it… and the life-support computer system was on its last legs. We didn’t have time to get in a new life-support computer—we can’t get in the equipment fast enough with the blockade. The air was getting bad. It’s that simple. We risked a total breakdown in life-support systems without some kind of guidance computer. A brain interface was the quickest way—the only way we had. The principle of cerebral interfacing…”

“I understand the principle.” Human brains store much more information than a computer in a much smaller space, and they respond to some things more quickly; brains could be grown, or surgically removed, from people who’ve signed their bodies over. Once perfected, using an interfaced human brain as an extension of a computer costs less than an elaborate computer storage system. “But, Bill…” He shook his head again, laughed hollowly. “It’s all experimental! And, anyway, it’ll never be practical for the Colony’s life support! We discussed this, and the committee voted against it! Brain tissue is too fragile; it deteriorates, ages, has a number of unpredictable qualities… and—for God’s sake!—you used Rimpler’s brain? I mean—Rimpler?”