John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

They went down a long, narrow hall to a door stenciled D5, visitors. The guard used a code-key to open the door. She went in first; she was uncomfortably conscious of the guard behind her; she was afraid he might grab her from behind. Maybe there was a warrant out for her now.

It was a small room, harshly overlit, featureless except for a number of metal chairs along the walls and a vent. Sitting in one corner, a tearful Asian woman was talking earnestly, in Chinese or Korean, to an Asian man in a detainee’s numbered blue printout. Paper pajamas, they called them. The opposite door opened, and Lester came in, trying to look proud in his own blue paper pajamas, a guard behind him. “You folks sit anywhere, you’ve got a half hour,” Kitty’s escort said.

Lester looked around sullenly till he saw her. He smiled and strode to her; she met him halfway and hugged him. She heard him suck his breath in quickly, and she asked, “I hurt you, huh? They bruise you pretty bad?”

“Ribs a little cracked, is all. They taped ’em up.” He put his arm around her, and they went to sit in the corner opposite the other couple. The guards stood together at the visitors’ door, talking in low voices about a glider race in the Open.

Kitty and Lester sat with their knees together, holding hands. They kissed. For a few minutes they looked at each other and Lester told her not to cry. But it was Lester whose eyes were filling.

When they spoke, it was in technicki.

“They beat you up since you been here?” she asked in a whisper.

“No. Just before they brought us in, if we even twitched a little. Here they mostly treat us like they’re dogcatchers and we’re the dogs. Dogcatcher doesn’t beat the dogs, but he ain’t nice to ’em, either.”

“She was right.” Meaning Chu. Kitty didn’t want to say her name here. “They haven’t got her yet. They… interrogate you?”

“Twice. Real politely the first time. Second time I think they were gonna use electricity, maybe drugs, but then Russ Parker came in, told them to send me back, he’d oversee an interrogation at ‘a later date.’ They didn’t like that. It’s like…” He glanced at the guards, lowered his voice further. “…like there’s some kind of feud between the SA security and the old security. Which is, you know, kind of interesting. Maybe we could…”

“Lester…” She made a sound of exasperation. “I can’t believe I’m doing this—I mean, I’m getting into this thing where the woman tells the man, ‘Please don’t do it, darling!’ I don’t like getting stuck in those archaic female roles, Lester. Don’t make me have to plead like that, okay?”

She was angry, and she wasn’t sure if it was at Lester or the Second Alliance or both. She was buzzing with it, and it was too much to handle; it made her want to cry.

“Well, babe, what you want me to do?” he asked, patting her baby-big belly.

“I want you to play their game. Play Uncle Tom if you have to. We’ve got to get off this thing. Out of the Colony. ”

She glanced at the guards and saw with a chill that both of them were looking at her.

She wanted to spit in their faces. But she turned back to Lester and whispered, “They piss me off, too, Lester. But they have the guns and we don’t. They know about you. And—the others.”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. One of the tears that had been waiting there was freed to slip past his nose. He laughed softly at himself and wiped it away. “Crying. I’m a wimp, huh?”

She shook her head, feeling close to tears now herself.

“Thing is,” he said, his voice breaking, looking at the floor, “there’s no way they’re going to let me out of the Colony, even if the blockade drops—maybe not even here. They don’t want people on Earth talking them down. They got politics to worry about. I mean, you know where I am, here? I’m in a jail within a jail inside another jail. I’m in the lockup, and I’m jailed by being black here, and I’m jailed by being in the Colony at all, nothing but vacuum around us.” He shook his head. “No way out. Nothing to lose.”

“What about this?” She took his hand, put it on her belly.

They both felt the baby move. He smiled.

“How is he?”

“He? It’s going to be a girl!”

“You had ultrasound? I thought we were going to be surprised.”

“I just know…”

“Bullshit, it’s going to be a boy.”

“A girl.”

“A boy.”

They laughed a little, and that felt good. Then she started to cry for real.

He took her in his arms and whispered, “I don’t know. Must be a way. This guy, Russ Parker… maybe you could talk to him. I can’t see him, they won’t let me. I already asked.”

She drew back from him to ask, “What about an attorney?”

“They’re all appointed for you, and they all belong to SA. And even if they’re sympathetic, they can’t do shit because of the emergency-martial-law thing.”

She shrugged. “I don’t think they’d let me see Parker.”

They embraced again, but then the guard who’d given her that look came over and tapped her on the shoulder. “Come on, time’s up.” He had halitosis.

“It hasn’t been a half hour,” Lester said, and she could see him working hard to control his temper.

“I don’t care. I can’t stand looking at this unnatural relations here no more—”

Lester stood up, drew his arm back, shouted, “What’d you say, motherfucker?”

And the guy hit him with the RR stick he had ready in his hand. It happened too fast to see where he’d hit him; she didn’t see any blood, but Lester went to his knees, stunned, and Kitty—sobbing, “Stop it!”—pushed between them, bent to put her arms around him.

The other guard came over. “That’s enough, lady. Come on, he’ll be all right.” He took her by the elbow, dragged her firmly out the visitor’s door. She yelled something and the guard ignored it and…

A few minutes later Kitty was in the elevator, going back to the dorms alone, shaking and holding her heavy middle, trying to control the sobbing.

But as she passed Admin’s level, she punched for stop and reset the elevator. She went back up to Admin. To see Russ Parker.

It was another wet day in Rouen, and Watson was tired of the place. The old quarter of town had a certain charm, with its narrow, cobbled streets, its rococo eighteenth-century buildings. But he’d come now to the abandoned supermarket they were using as a detention center; it was in the “new” quarter, which was already dilapidated, the high-rises dreadfully ill-kept, and the streets choked with debris.

It was nine a.m. He’d had a meager breakfast of stale croissants, orange juice going off, and excessively sweet coffee, and he was still hungry. The rain had been sputtering all morning; it returned as he stepped from the SA staff car to the cleared path that led between heaps of soggy trash and wet rubble. The barren supermarket building looked markedly truncated between two high-rises. They’d left ten-foot heaps of rubble around it as a defensive bulwark against guerilla attacks.

Watson wore his most elaborate uniform, just to cut back on red tape, and a shiny billed cap he himself had designed. Rain dripped off the bill as he stepped up to the metal doors and showed the helmeted guard his ID. He was ushered quickly inside.

It was more like a cattle barn than a supermarket now. The shelving had been removed, replaced by rows of pens to one side, wire fences between them, guards on the walks between fences. The pens were crowded and it was sickeningly obvious that some of the chemical toilets were overflowing. He must see that they had the prisoners clean them out, as they presented a health hazard for the guards.