John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Smoke was at the window, looking out at the sky, squinting as he tried to see some detail of the Colony; but it was just a pale glimmer, a fragment of Bethlehem’s marker, forty degrees above the horizon. “They made that thing up there out of asteroids and pieces of the moon.” He spoke to Richard Pryor and the crow tilted its head as if listening, and Smoke was grateful. Talking to yourself didn’t look quite so undignified when you had something, someone, to pretend you were talking to.

Dignity. A haggard, grimy, stooped, gaunt, bearded man. His gray-shot black beard matted, his eyes too intense, his hands always faintly shaking and dirty as rat’s claws. And we’re talking about dignity?

But dignity was everything to Smoke.

Hard-Eyes and Jenkins were behind Smoke, their backs to him, talking to Steinfeld and Voortoven and Willow. Yukio was there, too, but he wasn’t talking. Smoke knew Yukio was listening, though.

Smoke listened to bits and pieces as Hard-Eyes and Steinfeld interrogated one another. Smoke tuned in and out.

He kept his eyes on the man-spark hanging in the blue-black sky.

(Just below the window ledge, on the outside, gleaming with rainwater, was the egg, the metal bird had attached the day before. It was sending a signal that meant They’re in the room now …)

Smoke looked at the sky, and, now and then, he listened.

“Let’s talk basics,” Hard-Eyes was saying. “We’re talking no salary, not even after the revolution, supposing that ever happens.”

“No salary: correct. But I didn’t say anything about a revolution. We’re not revolutionaries. We’re international partisans. We want to re-establish the republics that existed before the war. Elimination of the jurisdiction of the Second Alliance is obviously a prerequisite.”

“‘Elimination,’” Jenkins said. “Has a nice clean sound to it.” There was no subtlety to Jenkins’ sarcasm, “How big you say the SA weighed in at?”

Steinfeld hesitated. Smoke couldn’t see him, but he knew the man and his mannerisms. He could imagine stocky, tired-eyed Steinfeld with his long, iron-gray hair neatly parted in the middle, caught up in the back with a twist of wire. With his black beard, the white streak down the middle so neat-edged it could almost have been dyed there. The short, blunt fingers raised, fanned out just above the top of the scarred desk, the deltas of fine lines at his eyes deepening as he concentrated on his reply. His ineffaceable sense of mission never faltering no matter how much he backed and filled and weaved and bobbed in his dealings. Whop —the hands coming down flat on the desk as Steinfeld spoke: “Half-million, it’s said. And growing.”

“Half-million. They have a half-million men in Europe.” Jenkins said it with stagey disbelief.

Steinfeld went on to answer the unasked question hanging in the air. “And all told, if we count splinter groups, factions, the NR could muster four, five thousand. But on this front of the resistance, we’re not going after them head-on. We sabotage, we guerrilla their flanks, we chew a lot of little wounds in them till they weaken from bleeding.”

“Go back to the part about “this front’,” Hard-Eyes said. “What’s the other front?”

“Negotiating for help. From the Japanese. And others. We’re working on it.”

“What about the States?” Jenkins asked.

“You must be bloody joking,” Willow said. Willow—in olive-drab fatigues, tennis shoes rotting apart, stolen AK-49 assault rifle across his lap. Broomstick skinny, thatch of colorless hair, a beard that belonged on some aging Chinese emperor, bad teeth; spoke in a monotone, the British mumble. “Fucking Yanks wanking off the fucking Nazis.” He pronounced it Nazzies. “They like the fascist takeover becorz they figure it’s either that or commies. And they got big promises for big business deals from the fascists.”

“All this…” Steinfeld tilting his head back, making the beard jut at the ceiling. So Smoke pictured it (all the time watching the indistinguishable movement of the Colony). “All this… supposition. But I do think they have come to some accommodation.”

“Mark me,” Willow said, “they plan to divide fucking Western Europe up betwixt the blewdy power brokers.”

“I’m still thinking about ‘no salary,’” Hard-Eyes said flatly.

“What do you believe in?” Voortoven asked. He was a broadchested, muscular man, always clean. Curly brown hair.

“What?” Hard-Eyes was a little startled.

“Do you believe in anything at all? You just want money to bribe your way back to the States? You going to play the drifter who does not get involved? Or you are, maybe, a mercenary?”

“We’re not above using mercenaries,” Steinfeld said, a fraction hastily. “‘Mercenary’ is no insult.”

Voortoven snorted.

Steinfeld went on, “We can’t pay money, but we can pay in goods and, eventually, in transportation.”

“I want to know what he believes in,” Voortoven said.

Forty-five seconds of silence as they waited for Hard-Eyes to declare himself.

Hard-Eyes said, finally, “When I find it, I’ll know it.”

“To know what we are takes time,” Steinfeld said. Steinfeld was Israeli. Long history of involvement in radical movements, Democratic Socialist, but never stained Marxist. It was assumed he had a family in Israel. He’d never mentioned them, but there were pictures in his wallet no one had seen up close. And it was assumed he was run by the Mossad—which might be a wrong assumption.

Hard-Eyes had heard that one, too. “You might be anyone,” he said, looking at Steinfeld. “I could get killed and never know who I’d been working for. Dying for.”

A full seventy seconds of silence this time. And then Jenkins said, “You say we could trade some mercenary work for transportation. We work for you awhile and then…”

Smoke stopped listening. He focused on the Colony and said, “Richard, you know how many tons that thing is, up there? More than the membranes of thinking can carry.”

The crow fluttered and dug at its breast for a louse.

“You’re not impressed? Crows take bright things into their nests, Richard. The Colony construct is both a nest and a bright thing. You know how many tons that nest is, Richard?”

The crow shook itself.

“I don’t either. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. At least it’d weigh that on Earth. They’re supposed to be making it bigger and bigger. There are no crows there…”

Looking at the Colony, a city tossed into the sky, Smoke felt a sucking vertigo. He looked away from it, down to the Earth. He and the crow gazed out at the wrecked harbor, beyond to the Ijsselmeer, and Smoke had a strange sense of being in place, wedged somewhere outside the flow of time.

The harbor’s flooding had submerged the docks and boardwalks; it had thrown boathouses up past the sidewalks, half crushed them against the swamped bases of the buildings; it had wedged boats into alleys and had made trucks and cars the new housing development of octopi and sea anemones. There was a whirlpool marked by twisting fluorescent foam where the outflowing currents from the rivered streets met the tidal push of the sea. The harbor’s sea vista was hobbled by half-sunk ships, boats, tankers jutting like tombstones. There, and there, well apart, were two dull red throbs, where campfires illuminated stanchions and deck fittings on the upthrusting superstructures of two foundered ships; a couple of squatters there, perhaps three more over there, feeling relatively secure on the wrecks with expanses of cold seawater between them and everything else; more security than in the city, where scavengers roamed the rooftops or sculled the narrow, flooded streets in boats.