John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Smoke was standing near the door, the crow perched on his right hand. He held it near his cheek and murmured to it.

Charlie was feeling logy, thinking of bed. He stretched, rubbed at his numb buttocks once, and started to walk out past Smoke.

“Hold it, young Chesterton,” Smoke said, looking at the crow but smiling for Charlie’s benefit.

Charlie stopped, waited, wondering if Smoke was going to reproach him for something.

“You’ll continue antipropaganda training, Charlie,” Smoke said, “but we won’t be placing you in a network mole position.”

Charlie stared at him. “I can do it. I was a little sleepy tonight, but I followed the whole… uh…”

Smoke shook his head. The crow cawed raspily, almost like laughter. “No problem with your alertness. We need you elsewhere. You know about video-evidence tampering? The AntiViolence Law programming?”

“Just the first briefing. Not much.”

“We’ve got a special project for you. You’ll be part of a team that’s going to be working with a US senator.”

Charlie stared. “What? A US senator!”

“Oh, yes. If you volunteer.”

Charlie shrugged. “You’re Smoke. You’re Jack Brendan Smoke. Without you, man, I’d still be asleep. You need it, you got it.”

Lester was home, just stepping into their unit. Kitty Torrence heaved herself off the bunk and couldn’t keep from groaning. She ached in a dozen places; when she stood, the dull aches became sharp ones, making her suck air through her teeth. The baby squirmed in her swollen belly.

“ Duhgedda …” Lester began.

“Lester, we said we weren’t going to talk technicki because the baby should learn standard, right? We got to get in the habit before…”

“All right, okay. Don’t get up, I said.”

“Got to. Time to fix dinner.”

“Kind of thing it is, I can do it just as well. Your belly like that, isn’t room for two of us to walk around in here, anyway.”

She laughed and lay down; the dozen aching places that had begun to scream quieted to whining.

She watched him fix dinner. On the Space Colony, while they were on rations, “dinner” meant he took two airline-food trays from the storage unit and put them in the microwave.

“Be good when we can afford some real food around here,” Lester muttered. He was a small, wiry man; it was as if he’d been bred for the twenty-five-by-thirty-foot studio unit they shared.

There was a queen-size bunk in its own nook, a wafer-thin sofa that folded down from the wall, a “kitchen” area with a “dining bar” about the size of a card table. There was thin foam rubber over the floor; the walls were coated in light blue syntex, which was mottled around the edges with mildew. Once a week she hung fresh drapes of garment material over the bed alcove and above the little sofa. The light was from a soft white ceiling fixture. A small videoscreen was flush with the wall to the right of the door, which covered the screen when the door was open. Just now it was clicked to a soothe-scene. There was a selection of six soothe scenes. It also served as a TV for the techniwave channel and the twice weekly movies Admin was supposed to provide. It was also the monitor for the house Intranet. Mostly they used it for movies—only there’d been more equipment failures, and they hadn’t had a movie for a month. Lester frowned over the videoscreen, trying to change channels. “It’s fuckin’ up. You’d think with my training I could fix it but… problem’s not in this unit.”

“What you trying to get?”

“The mountaintop scene. Where you can see the wind blowin’ the snow off the mountain.” Lester’s favorite. “There it is… see if I can get it in better…”

“I guess you’d rather play with that thing than give me a kiss. I don’t blame you, the way I look now.”

He chuckled and came to her, bent to kiss her. “You are the prettiest thing in creation. Of course, I need an eye implant pretty bad.”

She pretended to punch him in the shoulder. He acted as if she’d broken his arm, making the arm swing loosely, hamming it up. She smiled up at him. He may be small but he’s a handsome man. And he’s smart.

The microwave went ding ! and he got their meal. He put pillows behind her so she could sit up, leaning against the wall, holding the tray on her pregnant belly. He sat beside her, scowling as he ate. He resented the airline food. It was an issue with him.

The nausea caught up with her halfway through the meal, and she put the tray aside. “You were later than I thought you’d be. Does that mean, um…”

“That they gave me work? Wish it did. Another bullshit day wasted in a waiting room. No fucking work. Another week of subsistence creds. I’m late ’cause I stopped off at Bitchie’s to talk to Carl.” He hesitated. “And the others. They asked me to… just to talk…” He sounded almost puzzled.

The others. He’d gone to a meeting, then. Colony New Resistance.

The only argument she’d had with Lester in a month happened after they’d gone to an NR meeting together. The New Resistance rep, Carl Zantello, had said some things about Admin and the Second Alliance she thought were crazy. He’d claimed they were part of some enormous racist conspiracy. Crackpot stuff. She’d agreed that Admin was mishandling the Colony, was treating people badly. But saying they were part of a new international Nazi party or something… Zantello was watching too many movies, she’d told Lester. And Lester had yelled at her that she’d believe it if she were black, because if she were black, she’d feel the way SA people looked at blacks; she’d notice how they related to the other races, the way they treated them.

A black man could feel it all coming down. Maybe some kind of survival skill evolved in American blacks, Lester said. A keen awareness of prejudice in others; a talent for sensing the plans that followed the prejudice.

A tendency to slide into plain old paranoia, she’d said.

Two weeks after the meeting she’d been called to the Security office, to see Russ Parker. Not a bad man, she thought.

But he’d talked to Lester, too, and Lester had come home angry. “They’ve been watching me,” he’d said.

“So—they asked you to make a speech?” she asked now.

“Kind of.” He grinned. “I guess it was, yeah. I talked about the prejudicial work-assignments. I swear to God—l never expected to see this on the Colony in the goddamned twenty-first century. It’s like all that Civil Rights work never happened—it took so little to start them backsliding. They’re hiring Caucasians, and a few ass-kissing Spanish and Japanese. And nobody else is getting work assignments. So nobody else is getting anything but subsistence creds. Most of the technickis—even the white ones—are bitching about it. In private. But everybody’s afraid to bitch in public because of the ‘preventative detention’ bullshit.” He ticked off the names of the technicki political prisoners on his fingers. “Judy Wessler, Jose Arguello, Abu Nasser, Denny Bix—all of ’em arrested, no one gets to talk to them. Shit, we don’t even know if they’re still alive.” He took a deep breath and then, staring fixedly at the snowy mountaintop scene, said, “So me and Carl decided the time’s come for another general strike.”

“Lester…” She wanted to shout at him. But she knew how he’d react. She needed to change her tactics. She carefully modulated her voice and said, “Lester, you’re right. We should all go on strike again. It’s called for. But—we got to think about timing. While the New-Soviet blockade’s on, the SA can do what they want with us. I mean, you said they were some kind of Nazis, right? And they know you’re a socialist. Black is bad enough—but socialist! If they’re fascists, they don’t have any conscience about hurting people—maybe even killing people—that stand up to them. Especially black socialists, Lester.”