John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He let his voice trail off, seeing her distress. She was standing there with one foot on the other, chewing her lip, frowning at the floor. She hadn’t been able to follow it all, and didn’t want to admit it. He was relieved. He didn’t want to have to tell her these things. She was just a little girl. He was afraid she would ask him about the torture. The murders the CIA had sponsored: the death squads. He didn’t want to have to tell her.

And it was a relief to see the limits of her comprehension, the limits of her precocity, because he wanted her to be a little girl. His child, his daughter, his proxy retreat into innocence.

“You get the idea,” he said gently. “The CIA pretend to be the friends of freedom but they’re the opposite—or sometimes they are. So we have to protect you from them… And people like them… And the implant chips are going to change the world, and we have to get a sort of jump on that change, to use it for our protection.”

She looked up at him, bobbing her head. “I know that.”

“Good. I’m tired of waiting for the doctor. Let’s go find him.”

“Okay. I have to pee.”

“The New-Soviet is losing the war,” the man on the giant screen said. “They’ve been driven back to the old Warsaw Pact lines in Central Europe. They hold only a small corner of Afghanistan, and only unimportant territories in Iran. The orbital battlefield has been static for some time, with the US and NATO holding the important orbits; the New-Soviet Orbital Army’s only advantage is its blockade of the Colony…”

Charlie was standing against the wall in Grand Central Station, just below and to one side of the enormous clock over digital advertisement signs. He glanced at his watch. Three-fifty. His contact was due at four.

The crowd in the vast, hangarlike spaces of the old train station wasn’t large at this hour; but it was feverish. People walked by with single-minded haste, their paths criss-crossing in a perpetual chaotic meshing.

Opposite the clock, a big videoscreen, slightly washed out in the daylight, flashed through a series of gigantic images illustrating the remarks of the commentator. The screen was silent unless, like Charlie, you wore a headset tuned to the screen’s sponsor station, on which you’d now hear the commentator continue, “While it is true the New-Soviets control the key shipping lanes in the Atlantic, their ‘superior’ sea power is already beginning to show its weaknesses; ships in greater numbers simply do not make up for inferior technology. War is primarily carried out through orbital drop and remote controlled ‘smart’ tech—at which the Allies excel. The great risk now is this: If the New-Soviets feel they are losing, they may assume we will take the initiative and invade Russia itself. Rather than abandon their way of life and their independence, they may attempt a nuclear first strike.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said.

“No, it’s Angelo,” Angelo said, walking up to him. “’Lo, Charlie, ’sap, my man.”

“Angelo! You’re the…?”

“Yeah. Fuck the passwords. I forgot ’em, anyway. But it’s me. They didn’t tell you?”

“Shit, no, I thought it’d be some Pakistani in shades or something. Damn!” They clasped hands.

Charlie had known Angelo for twelve years, since they were kids. It was Angelo, four years before, who’d recruited Charlie into the NR.

Angelo was small, thin, pale, but his curly hair and eyes were dark. He had a wide mouth that split into a big, luminous grin at almost any stimulus at all. He wore an old black leather jacket and beat-up jeans, black tire-rubber boots. His eyes flashed around as if he were walking into a party and expecting to see someone he recognized. He was like that no matter where he was.

“That guy,” Charlie said, nodding toward the screen, “claims the New-Soviets have lost the war. You think so, or is that propaganda bullshit?”

Angelo looked at the screen. “Naw, that guy’s a liberal. Not one of the Administration’s flunkies. If he says they losing, they probably are.”

“He says they might panic and first-strike us.”

“Fuck it. Out of our hands. You got a tan, Charlie. You look stupid with a tan. Come on, we gotta go right to class.”

“ More classes. About what?”

“Video animation. Digital pix. You know anything about it?”

“Programming basics.”

“This goes way, way beyond. This stuff is classified. Public doesn’t even know it exists.”

“What’s this crap about a senator?”

“Don’t talk about that in public, man. Don’t even think about it.”

“Shit! Look at that!”

Charlie pointed at the videoscreen. The program had changed. Now it showed the Arc de Triomphe, the image rocking as if it had been shot from something moving erratically toward the arch. It swelled in the screen as the camera got closer and closer.

Charlie turned up his headset and heard, “… video obtained from an assault vehicle of some kind, possibly a Jægernaut, shortly before the destruction of the arch last month. This video would seem to refute NATO claims that the arch was destroyed in aerial bombing carried out by the New-Soviets.”

“So what about it?” Angelo asked.

“Smoke told me about that—he got it to Judy Cotz at Cableview and damn if she didn’t get it out onto the Grid! Shit, I’ll bet it gets shut down, and fast. See that, those guys on top of the arch? You can see the muzzle flashes. That’s our guys!”

“Fuck, Charlie, keep your voice down.”

But the station was raucous with train announcements, music blaring, the perpetual rising and falling drone and drumroll of people talking and walking.

As the camera got closer to the Arc de Triomphe, a contiguous mike picked up noise generated from the arch’s top: the structured squeal of an electric guitar and the chilled-out rhythm of programmed percussion.

“Man!” Angelo said. “That’s Rickenharp! ”

Charlie nodded. Both of them stared up at the screen, awed by the video of Rickenharp’s final minutes. As the commentator said, “These two resistance martyrs—one of them has been tentatively identified as former download-recording artist Rick Rickenharp—drew the SA’s attention to the arch in order to provide a decoy so that other important Resistance operatives could escape. Using a porta-amp, guitar, a mini-PA system, and sheer defiance, they drew not only the fire of the Second Alliance troops but the devastating attention of the Jægernaut…”

They heard Rickenharp shouting over the music, “Hey, you, with the machine gun! Come on, give me your best shot!”

…and Rickenharp, a tiny figure up there, almost unseeable. But hearable. His voice and his guitar, kicked through those mean little Marshalls, was audible even over the gunfire. Some original tune now… you couldn’t make out the lyrics but you knew what it was about… you’d heard a thousand permutations of it. It was an anthem, and it was about being young. Maybe it should have been called Youth .

And then the Jægernauts rolled in from the east and west, two of them converging on the arch. They came like the neo-Fascist war machine itself. They came on like mortality. Looking from below like five-story spoked wheels, the spokes digging into whatever was in the way. There were clouds of dust, showers of smashed stone. The Arc crumbling. The neo-Fashes scattered, cheering. Yukio kept sniping at them from the shrinking top of the Arc…

The echoes of his gunshots rolled like bass lines for Rickenharp’s electric wailing. Rickenharp had cranked the amps all the way up; he could be heard over the squealing of the oncoming Jægernauts…