John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“But if the SA find out—”

“We’re not going to advertise it. And if you do your part, the new board of UNIC, NASA, and the US Orbital Army will be working to protect the Colony. It’ll be one of the safest places in existence.”

“What do you mean—my part?”

“They want you to take over as Chairperson. As the new Colony Chief. You’re the daughter of the man who designed the place. You have experience in Admin Council. You’re someone UNIC and the NASA people can relate to. They’ll accept the new order there with you in charge.”

“Me in charge…?”

“Yes. And we want you there.” He smiled. “Because you’re NR.” After a moment he said. “Well? What do you say?”

She turned and looked at Torrence. Then she looked at Witcher. Then she looked at the floor and frowned.

No one said anything. Except the clock on the wall that said tick tick tick tick …

“I feel different about a lot of things,” Torrence said.

He was sitting up, holding Claire in his arms, in the hotel room’s double bed. The bedclothes had been thrashed onto the floor; the sheets were rumpled like a great carnation around them. Moonlight from the double glass doors onto the balcony silvered them.

“I was childish about Lila and Karakos,” Torrence said. “I wasn’t thinking of what you went through. I wasn’t really seeing you, then… Claire, don’t go back.”

“I decided.”

“Claire…”

“I have a responsibility to it. To my dad, too. Steinfeld and Witcher both said it’s the best work I can do for the NR. I’m going.”

She reached up and touched his face and her fingers were shocked by the tears on his cheek. But she didn’t change her mind.

Across an ocean, Smoke lay partly propped up in a hospital bed, feeding crusts to his crow. The crow sat on a perch in a square brass cage, the door of the cage wide open, on a table to Smoke’s left.

Beside the table was a cot, on which Alouette slept, curled up. She had insisted on sleeping in the same room with him, supposedly to keep him company. The TV was on, but Alouette could sleep through anything. It was because of her—because the nurses could deny her nothing—that the hospital had grudgingly allowed Smoke to keep the crow here, though the bird was supposed to be in the cage.

To the right of his narrow bed was a machine that fed him through a tube in his right arm. There was a bandaged hole in his chest, just under his sternum. A TV on the wall across from him chattered happily about peace negotiations. The New-Soviets. The new president. The disappearance of key American SA personnel. Not a word about the European SA. It was like the Iran/Contra hearings in the last century; then, too, the investigators had looked just so far and no farther. The Iran/Contra investigators ignored the evidence linking the president. It was now as it was then—as if they didn’t want to see certain things. Didn’t even want to think about them.

On Smoke’s lap was a clipboard and a letter he’d scrawled to Steinfeld. He wondered who he could trust to take it… so that Witcher wouldn’t intercept it. Witcher wouldn’t like the last paragraph:

I’m worried about Witcher. Did he ever give you his lecture on World Government and why it’s the next step? He has it all worked out, or so he thinks. He doesn’t like the SA’s notion of a world government. He prefers his own ideas. His personal vision of One World. He doesn’t even hint about his part in it. But I think we should both be worried about him.

Smoke tore the sheet off the clipboard and stared at it. Then he tore it into many small pieces and let them drift to the floor.

He sighed. He no longer ached all the time, no longer felt feverish. But he was tired. Needed to rest. After he got out of the hospital, there would be work. There would be no rest for the handful who felt the chill; who acknowledged the shadow of the Eclipse.

The Puerto Rican nurse came in and said, “You want me to turn off the TV? You look tired.”

“Yes please. I’ve lost the remote.” He closed his eyes and lay back. “Turn it off.”

A tooth in a star.

It looked like a broken tooth; a molar broken off near the jaw. The shattered remains of the Arc de Triomphe in the center of L’Étoile, where the great avenues of Paris come together to form the arms of a star. Men in dirty orange worksuits labored in the Arc’s rubble, clearing, preparing, following the terse directions of the engineers and artisans operating out of the little aluminum trailers around the site. The laborers were men with sunken eyes, sallow skin, filthy beards, and the shaky movements of the malnourished. They worked under the unceasing watch of the mirror-helmeted soldiers in black cloth armor who stood guard over them. They worked as men thousands of years before had worked; as the slaves who’d moved stones for the pyramids had worked; as the Bronze Age men who had labored on Stonehenge: without gloves or cybernetic assistance. Hands bled on sharp edges of stone; knees bled from stumbling. There were two bulldozers, in another part of the site, for less delicate clearing, shuddering plastech machines that coughed and hummed. Around the worksite, guns gleamed in the dull sunlight. The Arc would be rebuilt. Or anyway, as one of the engineers had muttered, “A low-rez architectural scan.”

The Second Alliance—the twenty-first century’s neo-Fascists, operating under cover of a private international police force—had destroyed the Arc after Rickenharp and Yukio captured it for the New Resistance. An overzealous American SA commander with no comprehension of politics or French history had ordered the destruction of the Arc, that day, to get at the NR mice who’d hidden within its crown. To him the Arc was just a big heap of fancy stone used as a refuge for the enemy. That enemy’s bones had been found by the workers clearing debris, and tossed in the small-rubble bin.

The truth had been transmitted to the rest of the world through the Grid, the international media network; especially through that part of the Grid called the Internet, with its social media. But now there was an information blackout in SA-held Europe. The French knew what the neo-Fascists told them: The Second Alliance claimed that so-called New Resistance Terrorists had destroyed the Arc de Triomphe. The French mourned the monument, but few asked questions. The destruction was just more of the prevailing madness of the Third World War. There were just too many questions; the answers were one more thing being rationed to the survivors…

The Third World War had not been a nuclear war. After a Central Committee coup by KGB hard-liners ended what had been begun by perestroika and glasnost, the New-Soviets and NATO had squared off over Western Europe. But the New-Soviets lacked the technology and the infrastructure to win; fortunately they also lacked the will—or the irrationality—to choose the nuclear option.