John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Otherwise they woulda been destroyed for nothin’, without us. Look, you gotta get your mind off it. We do some Room, that’ll take you right out of your head. And into the Hollow Head, right?” He grinned. “I mean, fuck it, right?”

Charlie played hard to get for a while longer. But finally he said, “Okay. I got to make a report to Smoke, and then… I’ll meet you there.”

Sometimes it’s possible to bribe a man with promises of money. And Spector used all his politician’s skill to persuade the guard. Get a message out, friend, and you’ll be rewarded in a big way. I’m still a senator , right? In with the in crowd, right? Wrong, but the guard didn’t know it had gone that far.

Gave the guard a letter telling Burridge about the computer-generated evidence; and telling him to work on it seriously—or Spector’s news-release what he had on Burridge: the death of a girl named Judy Sorenson and just where she’d got the goodies she’d OD’d on.

Three days later, nine a.m., the guard came to Spector’s clammy cell, passed him an ear-cap, winked, and left. Spector put the capsule in his ear, squeezed it, heard Burridge’s voice: “Henry, there’s a method of digital analysis that’ll tell us if what’s on the video was genuine or computer-generated. First we’ll have to subpoena the digi-vid. Of course, as you’ve already been convicted, that’ll be hard. But we’re pulling some strings… we’ll see if we can get your conviction overturned in the next day or so. A Special Pardon. In the meantime don’t get panicky and mention that mutual friend of ours to anyone.”

But a week later Spector was being prepped for his execution. He sat on a bench, chained to five other convicts, listening to the prison’s TV program director, Sparks.

The videotechs called Sparks “the animal wrangler.” He was stocky, red-faced, with a taut smile and blank gray eyes. He wore a rumpled blue real-cloth suit. The guards stood at either end of the narrow room, tubular stun-guns in hand.

“Today we got a man won an execution-by-combat,” Sparks was saying. “An EBC is more dignified than the execution in stocks, so you fellas should be glad of that much, anyway. You’ll be given a gun, but of course it’s loaded with blanks.”

And then the chain connecting Spector’s handcuffs to the man on his right jerked Spector half out of his seat as the small black guy on the other end of the bench lost it, just lost it completely, ran at Sparks screaming something in a heavy West Indian accent, something Spector couldn’t make out. But the raw substance of it, the subverbal message in the guy’s voice—that alone spoke for him. It said, Injustice! Innocence! and it said, I’ve got a family! And then, it could say nothing more because the stun-guns had turned off his brain for a while and he lay splayed like a dark rag doll on the concrete floor. The guards propped him up on the bench, and Sparks went on as if nothing had happened. “Now we got to talk about your cues, it’ll be a lot worse for you if you forget your cues…”

Spector wasn’t listening. A terrible feeling had him in its grip, and it was a far worse feeling than fear for his life.

At home—the condo his wife had sold by now—he’d opened his front door with a sonic key. It sang out three shrill tones, three precise notes at precise intervals, and the door heard and analyzed the tonal code and the interval code, and opened.

And the voice of the man who’d tried to fight, the small, dark man… his voice, his three shrieks, had opened a door in Spector’s mind. Let something out. Something he’d fought for weeks to lock away. Something he’d argued with, silently shouted at, again and again.

He’d pushed for the AntiViolence Laws for the same reason that Joe McCarthy, in the last century, had railed at Communism. It was a ticket. A ticket to a vehicle he could ride through the polls and into office. Inflame their fear of crime. Cultivate their lust for vengeance. Titillate their own repressed desire to do violence of their own. And they vote for you.

And he hadn’t given a rat’s-ass goddamn about the violence problem. The issue was a path to power, and nothing more.

He’d known, somewhere inside himself, that a lot of the condemned were probably being railroaded. But he’d looked away, again and again. Now somebody had made it impossible for him to look away. Now the guilt that had festered in him erupted into full-blown infection, and he burned with the fever of self-hatred.

That’s when Bergen came in. Bergen spoke to the guards, showed them a paper; the guards came and whispered to Sparks. And Sparks, annoyed at the disruption in his scheduling, unlocked Spector’s cuffs. Glumly Bergen said, “Come with me, Mr. Spector.” He was no longer Senator Spector.

They went to stand in the hallway; a guard came along, yawning, leaning against the wall, watching a soap on his pocket TV. Voice icy, Bergen said, “I have an order to take you back to your cell, pending a reopening of your case. You’re going to get off. A Special Pardon. Rare as hen’s teeth. Burridge has proof the vid was tampered with. It hasn’t been made public yet, and in fact, the judge who presided at your trial is out of town, so Burridge arranged a temporary restraining…”

“Why is it you sound disappointed, Bergen?” Spector interrupted, watching Bergen’s face closely. When Bergen didn’t answer, Spector said, “You did everything you could to sabotage my defense. You were with them, whoever it was. Whoever set me up. I can feel it. Who was it?” Bergen stared sullenly at him. “Come on—who was it? And why?”

Bergen glanced at the guard. The guard was absorbed by the soap opera; tiny television figures in his palm flickered through a miniature choreography of petty conflicts.

Bergen took a deep breath and looked Spector in the eyes. “Okay. I don’t care anymore… I want you to know. Sonia, Baxter, and I—we’re part of the same organization. Sonia did it because her lover, a girl she’d lived with for eight years, was videoframed. She was very dependent on her. Baxter did it because he was part of another organization too: the Black Freedom Brotherhood—they lost their top four officers to a Second Alliance videoframe-up. Me, I did it—I planned the whole damn thing because I saw one too many innocent people die. We thought if you, a senator, were videoframed, condemned, publicly killed, afterward we’d release the truth, we’d clear you, and that’d focus public attention on the issue. Force an investigation. And something else—Simple revenge. We held you responsible. For all those people railroaded into dying.”

Spector nodded like a clockwork toy. Said softly, “Oh, yes. I am responsible… and now I’m going to get off. I’ll go free. And it’ll be blamed on your people, your organization. They’ll say it was an isolated incident, the only incident of videoframe-up. They’ll pressure me to shut up about it. And once I was on the outside, where things are comfortable, I probably would.”

And the realization came at him like an onrushing wall of darkness; it fell on him like a tidal wave: How many innocent people died for my ambition?

“Yes,” Bergen muttered. “Congratulations, Spector, you son of a bitch. Sonia and Baxter sacrificed themselves for nothing …” His voice broke. He went on, visibly straining for control. “You’re going free…”

But the gnawing thing in Spector wouldn’t let him go free. And he knew it would never let him go. Never. (Though some part of him said, Don’t do it! Survive! But that part of him could speak only in a raspy whimper.) “Bergen—wait. Go to Burridge. Tell him you know all about the Sorenson incident. Repeat it back to me.”