John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The two Jægernauts converged on the arch from opposite sides, began to grind away at it, spinning in place at first, then crunching down as the microwave beams took the fight out of the stone. Yukio’s bullets whined off the blue-metal scythes… metal bit down on stone with a screaming that was another kind of heavy-metal jamming with Rickenharp’s final chords: fat blue sparks shot out from the machine’s grinding spikes; cracks spread like negative lightning through the huge monument… the arch’s great crown bent, buckled inward…

“Holy shit,” Angelo breathed as they watched the Arc de Triomphe implode into a cloud of dust, boulders bouncing, gravel raining.

A final furious and defiant guitar chord and a burst of gunfire from the arch’s top, and then the arch fell into itself—and was replaced, for a moment, by a great pillar of dust and a monolithic silence…

“The sacrifice of these two men was more than a means of decoying the enemy from their friends. It was a symbolic act,” the commentator said . “It was their way of saying no to the SA’s unquenchable brutality…”

“You hear that?” Charlie breathed. “That’s fucking great. ”

“No way the government’s going to let ’em show that stuff again,” Angelo said.

“I don’t know. This goes out over the Internet too—someone for sure’ll hit copy. It’ll be distributed there for starts. Maybe if enough people saw it, they wouldn’t dare repress it… I mean, check it out, some of them were paying attention…”

Here and there, around the station, a few of the people wearing headsets were staring up at the screen, looking into the dust cloud surrounding the wreckage of one of the wonders of the world. They’d heard Rickenharp’s final chords. How many more had heard?

Charlie and Angelo looked at each other. Till now, they’d always felt, privately, that the NR’s struggle was a hopeless one; was more of a gesture than anything else. But now, that look, that silent exchange…

Hope.

“I’ve got to be wrong,” Russ muttered, rereading the personnel lists. “Praeger wouldn’t go that far.”

It was 8:10 a.m. Originally the Colony had gone by military time—0800, 0900—but Professor Rimpler had seen the need for “Earth homey” touches. So it was nine in the morning. And the light in the street-wide main corridors had a gray-blue tinge, like early-morning light, from six till eight. By now it was yellow. The few “cafés” still open along the Strip would be exuding the smell of eggs and bacon—though both were artificially made, artificially scented—and the vents would be pushing a brisk morning breeze along the corridors and through the shrubbery of the Open.

Russ wished he were there, in the Open, where you could see real, though reflected, sunlight; where you could see the grass wave in the air-conditioned wind…

But he was sitting in his tomb of an office, drinking ersatz coffee that tasted like sawdust mixed with thrice-used coffee grounds, and frowning at his work-screen’s list of personnel for the day’s outer-hull repairs.

It was routine, since the sabotage had begun, for Russ to approve all personnel lists for in-space repair. And he recognized twelve—count ’em, twelve!—names on the morning’s list for Repair Module 17. They were all names from the Security Risk list. And they all belonged to blacks or Jews. And Praeger had already approved the list.

It didn’t add up. Praeger had made it clear to hiring agents that blacks, Jews, Arabs, and Pakistani/Indians were to be hired minimally, if at all. He claimed they were Security Risks who couldn’t be trusted on the outside. And now he’d approved a whole shipload of them. The only Caucasian personnel were people like Carl Zantello, an Italian… and a notorious radical.

Must be some mistake. Praeger’s assistant must have approved the list for him, without really looking at it. Something.

Unless… maybe Praeger had magically gotten himself some political savvy. Realized that he was only making trouble for himself by refusing work assignments to minority groups and radic technickis.

Forget it. No way. Praeger was too pigheaded to see that racism was counterproductive.

What was he up to?

Less than a quarter of a mile from Russ Parker’s office, Kitty Torrence was wondering more or less the same thing. She was thinking, What are they trying to do?

She and Lester were in the Open. They each had about forty minutes before they were to report for work, and they’d decided to use up one of their last passes to get into the park. It was much less crowded at this hour, and in the “mornings” the breeze, carried on the badly filtered ventilator systems, was only faintly tinged with putrefaction.

They stood on a low hill, looking up into the circumscribed sky, talking. Lester’s scowl surprised her; she’d expected him to be happy he’d gotten a work assignment that day.

But she understood when he told her about Billy Glass. A white co-worker.

“Billy didn’t know what it was,” Lester said. “They told him they were forming a new technicki union, and that if he went, he stood a better chance of getting some work. But they hassled him about how he felt about things, about the dark brothers and the radics. He wanted the work, so he played along. He felt bad about it. Anyway, he went to their meeting, and there was nobody there but white technickis except there were guys he figures are undercover for Security. The Security spies talked technicki. Said it was the radics who were screwing up for the rest of us. Said they were in league with the New-Soviets, and the New-Soviet blockade is what’s put us on half rations. Said the blacks and the Jews were working together to vandalize things. They pointed out that three of the prisoners in Detention for Life Support Endangerment are black. They asked Billy and the others to take a vow: If armed conflict comes up, they got to take up arms against the people of color and reformists. Billy got freaked out. Went out the back way, came looking to warn us…”

Lester and Kitty stood in silence for a while after he finished his explanation. Lester sullenly watched a helmeted guard walking by on the path below the hill. Kitty looking up at the swirl of clouds, like a hurricane’s eye, at one end of the immense green-furred tube that was the Open, wondering if Admin was really doing what it seemed. “Well, anyway,” she said, glancing at her watch, “in ten minutes you’ll have some real work.”

“Yeah. I got RM17. Lot of my friends going out on this one. Guess this is the token nigger mission.”

“Mmm… what they got you doing?”

He shrugged. “Going out to repair meteor damage. Pinhole stuff. They got me maintaining video comm with Repair Central. Which is kind of weird, because Judy Forsythe is going, too, and she’s the same rating. I don’t know why they need two comm techs. I’m surprised they need one.” He reached over and patted her stomach. “They won’t let you work much longer. Maybe if my job works out, you can quit right away.”

“Lester, I…” No, don’t tell him. But it came out on its own, all in a rush: “I’m scared to keep going to work. I’m afraid one of the supervisors’ll start thinking about the pregnancy and check to see if I’m on Parenthood Monitoring. They’ll make me go to PM, and PM’ll tell me the baby’s a risk from the radiation here or something and they have to abort it and…” She broke off and looked at Lester a little sheepishly.

He was looking at her like he couldn’t believe it. “Christ—I never thought about that. But—they wouldn’t do that —not with a baby that far along! Would they?”