John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Torrence didn’t understand the inner mechanisms of the projector. To him it was a harness of plastic and conductive ceramics, the narrow ceramic cone of the projective nozzle strapped around his upper arm. Switch it on and point your arm and it killed…

It killed images. Only images. But the victim was to be the image of a politician, the image a creature with a life of its own; and to destroy it would destroy the politician, in some sense.

Now Louis Cambon, the mayor, was stepping up to the podium. The cameras moved like eels out from their electronic warrens, telescoping sinuously through the air, just a lens on the body of a metal snake. They froze in an almost floral array like stamens around the jowly, balding figure of Cambon, crook-shapes angling back to stare at him. One of them gradually moved farther out, to the brink of the transparent shield, hooking back toward Cambon for a full-face shot, as he intoned the amenities and began his introduction of Larousse, “…the elected president of the Republic.” Torrence nearly laughed at that.

Someone was cutting a swathe through the crowd, angling toward Torrence: a drunk, wobbling out of kilter with the collective body language. There was nothing much to eat in Paris, except what was tossed off the back of trucks at the relief stations, but somehow there were always determined men who managed to find alcohol, Torrence thought. It was a superhuman talent.

This one wore a long black coat smeared with mud from sleeping in some damp park; his beard was caked gray with filth and his eyes were lost in squint as he bellowed at the stage, “ Voila! Le Maire de Quoi! Le Maire de Quoi!” The streetside nickname for Cambon: The Mayor of What?

The mayor of ruins, came the unspoken reply.

But aloud, there was only a nervous ripple of laughter in response. Cambon didn’t pause. None of the SA bulls, in their armor and armament, came to carry the drunk away. Not yet. But other, camouflaged cameras were at work. They’d have him computer-identified already. He was marked. He wouldn’t live out the night.

Four men dressed in the white jumpsuit of sanitation workers, here ostensibly to clean up after the crowd (which in any event had nothing to discard), came grinning and chuckling toward the drunk, surrounded him with a semblance of jokey reproach, good-naturedly herding him out of the crowd, slapping him on the back and winking at everyone. Just civic-minded city workers going to take the man home, they told the crowd, get him to his bed, let him sleep it off.

Removing him as casually as wiping a cinder from the eyes. No show of force. That wouldn’t do.

But the others, the ones who’d mutter Maire de Quoi, only under their breaths, knew the drunk would never be seen again. And they were the ones intended to notice his absence.

The crowd grew, swelled to fill the Place, to overflow it. Torrence was now in the midst of the crowd. Cambon was winding up his introduction of Larousse. Torrence hadn’t mastered French, but had enough to make out the phrases… like the mythical Phoenix leading us out of the ashes… the hope of France… I present: Frédéric Larousse!”

Ringers planted in the crowd started enthusiastic applause; the others reflexively followed suit.

Larousse and Cambon exchanged hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and then Cambon stepped to the rear and Larousse began to speak, and there it was, the little telltale: when he stepped up to the podium he seemed, impossibly, to come a little more into focus. As if Torrence had just put on a pair of glasses, corrected a nearsightedness. A change in the way Larousse looked, something you wouldn’t notice if you hadn’t been told about it. You might think: I never noticed before what sheer presence the man has…

The holographic correction of Larousse’s natural image had taken hold. He was transfixed and airbrushed by the hidden projectors, as he pointed to the image of the Arc in the huge screen. “This,” he said in French, “is a relic of the past. But it is also a monument to tomorrow. It will arise once more, prouder than its first incarnation, crystallizing an unbroken link to the past. Symbolizing a revitalized future.”

Work to rebuild the Arc had already begun. At first, the few opposition voices had grumbled of the waste of manpower and resources that should go to housing and hospitals and obtaining food for the city’s legions of homeless; thousands on thousands were living in ruined buildings, in refugee shelters and tent cities, and in the open streets, flotsam on the tide of war.

But Larousse’s Unity Party, a descendant of Le Pen’s National Front, had shut down the grumblers, had pressed on to rebuilding the Arc de Triomphe. The Foundations of Nationalism needed a symbol grounded in French history.

It wasn’t yet rebuilt. British neo-Fascists had crushed it with their Jægernauts, and everyone knew it.

How would they square that contradiction in the minds of the suckers? Torrence wondered.

A moment later, Larousse answered him. “…the Communist terrorists, the so-called NR, destroyed the Arc by hijacking Second Alliance demolition devices. Their perfidy has not cast its shadow on the French people, however—it was engineered by the New-Soviets, who connived to undermine our resolve…”

Simple as a lie.

Communist terrorists. There were people in the NR, guerrillas who were believers in the true French Republic, who would wax apoplectic hearing themselves called Communists. There were Communists in the NR; there were also anarchists, Libertarians, Christian Democrats, and every manner of conservative.

Torrence watched Larousse and felt it himself: a subtle summoning, a tug at his identity. Something about Larousse, something in his cadence, his gestures, his visual presence—something manufactured by the mind-control program designing the holographic enhancements of his image—that something called out to a visceral need to belong. To trust and follow and rage with him at the racial injustice that had slung chaos and poverty on all of them…

Torrence had to look away. But he knew his cues: he raised his arms with the crowd, which was now swept up in genuine enthusiasm that needed no ringers, and he chanted, “ Pour la France!” with the others when Larousse gave out with some particularly stirring phrase. But he kept his eyes focused elsewhere. He waited for the signal.

Colonel Watson and Dr. Cooper walked down the chilly, antiquated hallway of the Hôtel de Ville, and stepped into the Administrative Media Room. Watson had found the ornate interior of the other rooms overbearing; this stripped-down, utilitarian nerve center was a bit of a relief. There was no insolent historical presence here. Its ceramic-white consoles, unfailingly steady TV monitors, and humming mainframes were a kind of electronic continuity for Watson, a connection to the nascent Empire that was his dream and his life.

Watson, head of the Second Alliance’s European operations, was a tall, bulky Englishman in late middle age, florid and balding but energetic, his movements as brisk and crisp as his flat-black SA uniform, his demeanor authoritatively cheerful, the upbeat of a calculated achiever…

The milk-haired Cooper was a droopy, pallid contrast: a slender, thirtyish albino, by turns dyspeptic and then feverishly animated, wearing a dun Tech’s uniform: a rumpled, stained short-sleeve outfit at least half a size too big for him.

Watson firmly believed that poor tailoring bespoke the inner man. The two men bore their mutual dislike like a yoke when they walked together: stiffly cooperating but laboring under it.

Watson visibly unbent as he moved away from Cooper, shaking hands with the security chief, Klaus, the other techs and officers working at the consoles; accepting a cup of tea in a Dutch-china cup, exclaiming over it, exchanging banter, backslaps, and the changeless one-liners. “Welcome back, Colonel! Couldn’t bear that Italian food, or did those wop rosies tire you out?”