John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He rubbed his damp palms on his soft paper trousers. Then, annoyed at himself, he looked down and saw that the sweat had blackened his palm with print-dye. “I’m not sure I can be of much help. Seems to me, if we try to blowtorch into the place, he may retaliate by opening air locks here and there.”

Everyone reacted. Sharp intakes of breath, faces going pale, eyes staring as they imagined it. The Colony’s nightmare. The void, the cold vacuum, always waiting outside…

“There might be one way,” Russ said slowly. “Shut down power around the Colony except for battery-survival minimum for each section. While the main power lines are shut down, Rimpler can’t control the doors, air locks, anything. We can waltz in and shut him down easily.”

“Battery-survival minimum doesn’t provide for Security or for comm systems,” Van Kips said in her most brittle tone.

Praeger nodded his agreement. “Judith is quite right. We would be unable to seal off Admin with any effectiveness, unable to communicate with the Security Forces, and unable to maintain surveillance in the technicki dorms. It would be the ideal time to mount another rebellion. We’d be all but helpless.”

Russ snorted. “We’d still have most of the weapons, the armor, the trained guards!”

“It’s not enough,” Praeger insisted. “We’re too badly outnumbered. No. Absolutely not. We can’t risk dropping Security envelope. We’ll have to find another way in.”

Russ took a long, slow breath. He exhaled it even more slowly. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll try. I’ll play it by ear, see what we’ve got, try to break in. But if he…”

Tate put in, “In my opinion, he thinks of the Colony as part of himself. He has gone mad—he seems to be willing to be, in a way, deliberately incontinent, to foul and mutilate himself. But he won’t kill himself.”

“You’d better be right, Tate,” Russ said.

Kitty sat uncomfortably on the stone bench under the Monument, in the Open, looking up through the branches of the eucalyptus trees, smelling their menthol fragrance, wondering if she was being set up in some way.

She looked up at the statue. The Monument—a man in a pressure suit, sans helmet—created by an artist using a 3D printer, memorialized the EVA workers killed working outside the Colony. They were almost forgotten now. And the hypocrites would have to put up another monument for RM17.

The statue’s arm was raised, hand outreaching, his face exaggeratedly expressive of awestruck yearning for the stars. Bogus, Lester would say.

It was “noon,” so the mirrors and filters at the Open’s enormous circular windows, at both ends, diffused the park with a homogenous golden sunlight. The air here would have made a visitor from Earth gag, but to Kitty it smelled clean, after the dorms and the corridors. The Colony was choking itself; it was an organism whose liver and kidneys were failing, whose lungs were too clogged to filter out poisons. The foul air seemed fouler in the background of social tension: the persistent rumors about RM17; the latest cuts in food rations; the arrests. And the vandalism—the insane old man’s face that came and went on the comm system; the power failures and burst pipes.

She saw Russ coming a hundred yards away, cutting across the soccer field that no one was allowed to use at the moment—public gatherings of more than three were forbidden until Admin saw fit to lift the state of emergency—and she felt like running.

How could she trust the Chief of Security?

But Chu had surprised her. “Go see him,” she’d said. “There are strong indications he’s on the outs with Admin’s Council. He’s had several conflicts with them. The danger is, maybe he wants to flush us out through you, to regain their favor. But I have studied the man, and I don’t believe this is the case. He may be our best hope.”

She got to her feet, but it was too late to run. “Hello, Kitty,” Russ said, smiling wearily. He stepped onto the path and stood there awkwardly, hands in pockets, looking at his shoes, so she almost laughed at his “aw-shucks” posture. But then she realized he was staring at the grass stuck to his shoes. It was dried, yellowed. “Grass is dying out there,” he said. “They watered it this morning, looks like, but it maybe came too late. Maybe not pure enough water.” He looked up at her. “How you getting on?”

“Okay.” Then she shook her head. “No… not okay.”

He nodded and moved toward the bench. “Let’s sit down, talk.”

“Not there.” (Chu had advised her.) “I prefer to walk.”

He smiled sadly. “You think the bench is bugged? I could be wearing a bug, for that matter. But hell, let’s walk.”

They strolled down the path toward the Admin housing project. “Here’s the story,” he said in just above a whisper. “The Colony can’t go on this way. If we leave things the way they are, it’ll get worse before it gets better. There’s something happening here I couldn’t even describe to you… You’d think I was making it up. But it means that Admin is distracted now… and that could help. Now I’ll tell you something about RM17. You’re right about it. I trust you, Kitty. I don’t even know why. I do, though. I don’t trust the other radics. Maybe I trust you because the way I read you—I could be wrong—you aren’t politically motivated, not really. You just want decent treatment, a fair chance. So you’re not a radic, per se—I know your husband is, but… the way I see it, you’re a person willing to fight, but you don’t have any axes to grind ideologically.”

She wasn’t following him. “What about getting Lester out?”

“Sure, well, I’m comin’ to it.” He glanced around. “I fooled with the surveillance cameras, reassigned the guards out here, but all this open ground still makes me nervous. Damn, it looks empty. Seems a shame.”

“Hard to get permission to come out here lately. Kids are getting stir-crazy.”

“I know. That’ll change, too, if… okay, listen. What we’re going to have to do is to organize a counterforce, our own security outfit, and disarm the one that exists. But I’m going to need commitment from the technicki underground that they’ll coordinate with me. Move where I say, when I say. If they’ll do it, we’ll pull the rug out from under Admin. You’ll be my liaison with the underground. That way I don’t know who they are, so they aren’t threatened. The thing will happen in stages… You look like all this’s thrown you a bit.”

“I… God.” She shook her head in amazement. She hadn’t come prepared for this. Having a full-scale rebellion dropped in her lap. A complete takeover! “But how will you keep control of it after Earth finds out?”

“We’ll worry about that when we come to it. I think I can establish that Praeger’s Admin was guilty of murder, for one thing.”

“I—this is too much. I thought you were going to smuggle me and Lester out or something.”

“I can’t get Lester out until the Second Alliance thugs are disarmed. Those people are not under my command anymore, except for the simple day-to-day assignments. If I told them to disarm, they’d turn me into Praeger. They’re not the Colony’s security anymore—if they ever were. They’re SA.”

She stated it flatly. “They’re Nazis. Or something close.”

He sighed. “I’m beginning to think so too.”

They didn’t say anything for a while. Finally she had to say, “I’m scared.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Hayes was inside out, scraped clean.

Sometimes he almost felt like he was shining.

Hayes was standing in the Media Center. It was at the southern edge of Cloudy Peak Farm, an annex on Crandall’s private wing of the overgrown log cabin. On three sides were screens, and gear for bringing the screens alive. The fourth side was a filtered glass wall, which Crandall usually kept dialed to opaque. But it was a sunny morning near the end of March, and Crandall’s doctors had insisted—so far as they’d dared—that the sunlight would be good for the leader’s health. He’d let them dial the wall to transparency.