John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Hayes was the door guard, standing against the room’s only bare patch of nonglass wall; the door to his left, the screens to his right, transparent wall directly ahead. And Crandall, with Rolff and Ben, between him and the see-through wall.

Hayes liked to know where everything and everyone was. It was more than that he liked to; he’d been made that way. Made recently. (If he tried to think about how he’d been made that way, he came to an impenetrable membrane, and he had to turn back.)

He was supposed to keep track of things spatially, like a chess player visualizing the board. Because…

He didn’t know why. He knew it was for something. Anyway, it felt good.

Crandall was sitting in an electric wheelchair, still wearing pajamas and a robe. Looking frail. Hard to believe a man that sunken, that frail, had so much power. Behind him, on either side, Rolff Getzerech and Ben stood bodyguard.

“Guards right outside the building, ” Hayes had told Rolff. “Guards patrolling the grounds, in guard towers, on the fences, patrolling the area in helicopters and jeeps. Guards in the hall, at the door. Radar to watch for missiles. And with all that, he needs two more guys standing behind him all the time?”

“All those guards,” Rolff had said in his soft accent, “and yet the NR shot him and killed his sister. For a long time he would not come out from behind the bulletproof glass in his bedroom. He saw people with cameras. Even now he carries a gun on him. Even with the two guards.”

Now Rolff stood there with unflinching patience, wearing a short-sleeved Special Guardsman’s uniform, his big, meaty hands clasped like an altar boy’s over the brass SASG buckle with its chrome “iron cross” inset. Rolff was Klaus’s brother: Klaus Getzerech, the bodyguard and factotum for Colonel Watson. Rolff had Klaus’s delicate red lips, incongruous with the craggily chiseled face, the massive chest. His hair was so blond it was almost white; his eyes a blue so pale, they were almost silver. On his hips were a Browning machine pistol and a walkie-talkie.

Ben wore glasses, but he was as big as Rolff, his brown hair clipped into the classic Mid-American choirboy’s haircut. He had a dimple in his chin and small, empty brown eyes. He was dressed like Rolff. And like Hayes too. But Hayes hadn’t yet earned the privilege of attending church services in dress whites, like Rolff and Ben, even with the fake SA background Watson had created for him.

They were an impressive sight coming into the little chapel under the oaks with Crandall, in their honor-guard dress uniforms, modeled on Marine Corps dress but red and white. Mostly white.

Outside the glass wall, a guard in an armored uniform and mirrored helmet walked by, his visor making semaphores of sun-glint with his movements.

Hayes felt a strange unrest. Flashing lights.

His hand went to his gun.

But the guard walked by; the flashing went with him.

Hayes felt as if something had been taken from him just now. Like a section of his stomach had been pulled out like a drawer. He tried to think about what it was, but he felt the membrane again. So he simply took his hand off the gun, and the unrest went away.

Crandall was using a complicated remote-control box he held in his lap to switch on the screens. The big one across from him, first—most of the smaller screens to Crandall’s right were conference screens, for talking to the regional commanders and other high-ranking personnel. And for watching SA christenings, initiations, rites of all kinds.

At ten, Crandall was to watch a graduation presentation by the boy, Jebediah—the boy Crandall called “the living destiny of my church.” Just a precocious kid, as far as Hayes could tell. He’d seen him onscreen a few times. Smart, articulate, schooled in the Three Fundamental Ideas and all the ideological underpinnings. Even better schooled in it than Hayes, who knew Crandall’s Corrected Bible by heart, though he couldn’t remember ever reading it. The kid, Jebediah, seemed to understand it better. Give him that.

On the big screen there was yet another report about the war. The anchorman claimed the New-Soviets were retreating. “Unilaterally in retreat, their offensive splintered,” the guy said. There had been some increase of New-Soviet mobilization in orbit. Some analysts wondered if the orbital mobilization could be in preparation for a first strike—a plan to knock out our antimissile satellite weapons. Maybe it’s finally coming.

People should be more optimistic, Hayes thought. Look how marvelous the world was, really. Those Gridscreens, themselves. We take ’em for granted, but, hey, they’re amazing. Screens dancing with light. Sunlight outside the glass. Look through the glass out into the world. Look into the screens into other avenues of the world; the televisions were windows into the world. Nice thought. Made him feel shining. Positive, optimistic. Accent the positive in things. Screens were windows, windows into some big unknown mind, and all it’s thinking, each channel a train of thought—

“Smoke,” Crandall said, the sharpness of the utterance interrupting Hayes’s rumination. “That’s Jack Brendan Smoke.”

Casting about for a morning news program, Crandall had stumbled on someone all too familiar. Crandall’s jaws were clamped, muscles bunched in them.

‘The New Racism has deep, complicated roots,” Smoke was saying on the big screen. He was sitting in a pastel talk-show setting of some kind, with a talk-show interviewer nodding patiently to his right. One of the public-television types, judging from the fact that he didn’t interrupt with a lot of stupid, sensationalistic questions. Smoke was looking well-groomed, quietly confident. “Some of its growth is the accident of circumstances, and some of it has, I think, been cultivated by coalitions of highly organized racists.”

Crandall grunted at that and shifted in his chair.

Smoke went on. “There was a certain amount of backlash to civil rights legislation and racial quota hiring practices in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. But something even more important to the New Racism emerged in the 1990s, and continuously thereafter. The influx of non-European immigrants, especially Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis, people from India, from the Caribbean; Israelis, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese—all these people began to seem sort of overwhelming to the average American and the average Caucasian in Western Europe. The immigrants tended to create their own well-defined cultural environments in the urban settings, changing the looks of neighborhoods, threatening the standard American religions, altering the type of service available, and so forth. But the turning point came when immigrants began to organize for political power. Each one of these various new ethnic communities became a political force to be reckoned with. Most Americans could accept Caucasian European immigrants, even Hispanic immigrants—they were at least Christian—but not this other massive influx of unusually alien aliens. White Americans felt that their cultural traditions, their very identity as Americans, were threatened.”

“If I understood your latest writings…” The interviewer held up a copy of a printout’s cover page and read off the title: “ Wave of Darkness: The New Racism by Jack Brendan Smoke, published by Penguin Printouts… uh, if I understood it correctly, you link the reaction against immigrants to an increase in racial prejudice against blacks, native Americans, and Jews.”

“I do. I think this xenophobic reaction, this inflammation of the territorial instinct, if that’s what it is, grows and feeds on itself once it’s set free. Racism against one group leads to racism against another.”