John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Here he’d dialed the bedroom walls to lozenge-shape. He’d switched off the images of Big Sur which usually glowed from the walls, and he’d dialed the light low, adding a sensuous dollop of red tinge. Penderecki’s The Passion According to Saint Luke moaned from hidden speakers. “Okay, go ahead…”

Hermione looked at her watch and grimaced. When was the old bugger going to get it over with? He was mewling at her crotch, nosing at it like a pathetic blind puppy as she swacked his knobbed back, spat on his egg-head, told him he was cockroach dung—and he was still only half-tumescent!

“You haven’t got your mind on your work, you little SHIT!” she hissed, raising welts between his shoulder blades.

Rimpler muttered apologies. Hermione was right. His mind wasn’t on the game.

His mind was free-associating wildly, and parts of it seemed to break off from the main mass of his thinking and form venomous TV-eyed organs of pure self-consciousness; treacherous mental excrescencies that watched him, reported on him to some other sneering, sardonic part of his mind.

And the flashes of pain, instead of blinding his mind as they should have, instead of taking him out of himself, this time acted as eidetic drive-in movie screens, looming swatches of luminous white on which the derisive part of his mind projected images…

And he saw the thing he had built. He saw it on the screen of flash-pain. He saw the Colony. FirStep, ponderously rotating, a sort of technological totem-pole shape; in silhouette from just the right angle it was an Easter Island figure against the backdrop of space—space, the black and infinitely empty. Space, the brilliantly lit and overflowing with energy. Space, where the spectrum is unleashed.

And he seemed to see the thousands of tons of FirStep in blueprint, its world-class road map of wiring, its clusters of millions of computer chips, a thousand brains for its thousand segments, the people aswarm in it like E. coli in the belly of some enormous organism, independent of the organism but interrelated. And he saw its life-support systems, air and water filtration, the dozens of failsafes for airtight integrity against the ever-present gnawing of the vacuum of space, the reaches of insulation and the envelope of the atmospheric filter against the solar wind.

He visualized it in an infrared scan, with its areas of red and yellow for heat energy, its bluer areas where it radiated less heat, its solar-power panels shining with absorbed energy…

And he saw the thing in its skeletal stage, slowly coming together, something that had taken twenty years, now forming before his eyes in fast action, growing module by module like a coral reef, the construction pods darting fishlike around it. Growing from section A, a lonely outcropping in an endless sea, to an atoll to an island… A, B, C, D, and now E. Years of work materializing in technological crystallization.

And he had designed it, had overseen its construction, had made it grow around him.

Around him! He knew in that terribly clear, terribly ugly instant that it was only a hermit crab’s shell. Something he had pulled over himself, taken refuge in to hide his nakedness. The Colony was simply armor for Benjamin Brian Rimpler.

Oh yes: he’d been fascinated with satellites as a boy; with the sky’s ponderous celestial majesty; had nurtured a megalomaniacal adolescent fantasy of hoisting his own personal star into the sky. And later, horrified by the planet’s swarming malaise, its feverish self-gouging environmental suicide, he’d wanted to create an alternative world, a self-contained, intelligently controlled ecosystem where man—and nature—would be given a second chance. An answer to the population explosion, because it would be the first of many such alternative worlds…

Anyway, that’s what he told himself. And that’s what he told the media. The Colony would employ and house the poor. And in fact the bulk of its settlers were low-income technicki workers. So it looked good. It looked unselfish.

But he saw it, now. The Colony was a monumental act of selfishness. And his obsessive drive to get it built had killed his son.

Here, in the 2/3-grav section, in the exclusive optimum-lifestyle quarters, he had wrapped its vast tonnage about himself in layers of elaboration that seemed, now, only the intricacy of neurosis. Each life-support system, each failsafe and airlock seemed a form of his pathetic anality.

He sat back on his haunches, looked at Hermione, and perceived that he’d allowed a sort of parasite to crawl into his shell with him.

“Get out,” he said.

“What? Why, you little worm—”

“No, I mean it. I’m not trying to intensify the game. Get out.”

“Hey, don’t blame me because you can’t get it up. A man gets old and not even the best pro can help. If you’d take some—”

“Get out.”

She stepped back, lowering her whip, yawing between two poles, the overawed employee and the professional dominatrix.

“What? The price is still—”

“I paid you in advance. Get out.”

Hermione perceived that her license was revoked. She backed away, then turned, without so much as muttering, went to the bed to get her jumpsuit. She’d picked up on his urgency. There wasn’t even time to change out of the rubber. The little prick! (And she did mean little!) But he was the most powerful-man on the Colony, except for maybe Praeger. Rimpler could have her jettisoned if he wanted. She went quietly, thinking, I’m in Admin section; I could stop at a credfone and call Praeger. He’s into submissives; but what the hell, I can switch…

Rimpler watched her go, and one of the fragment outriders of his personality, the autoerotic, infantile part, looked after her with regret and whined to the rest of him. Mentally he slapped it and told it to shut up.

There was to be no more oblivion for him from that direction. It wasn’t working anymore. Maybe drugs. Booze. Maybe—

He saw himself in an evac chute. The gates open, the air sucks out, he’s ejected naked into void—

He recoiled, actually curled up and clutched at himself at the thought.

Terry was—

Recoiled again from that one, too, and tried to think instead about a stiff drink, something to eat…

He sat on his haunches, naked, parts of him smeared with Vaseline, his face still damp with her pheromone perfume, his back throbbing with welts, and fought an urge to run to the nearest airlock and jet himself naked into space—

That’d be real freedom, for a moment.

“Dad?”

His gut constricted. A muscle in his back jumped. Fear washed through him, acrid and cold. Claire. Claire’s voice. He was more afraid of Claire, at this moment, than he’d been of his own ice-queen mother. He was afraid of his own daughter.

If she should see Hermione…

But her voice came from the grid in the front door. Hermione was going out by the service corridor. Claire wouldn’t see her.

He shouted, “Claire—I’ll be right out! I’m in the shower.” Then he pressed the door button and said, “seven-three,” into the grid. The door analyzed his voiceprint, confirmed it, and opened the front door for her. But left the door to his bedroom locked.

“I’ll be right out,” he shouted through the door to the living room. He went to the bathroom, let the ultrasound shower cleanse him, shivered with the tingling of it, felt a vague pleasure knowing that a composition by Stravinsky was worked into the sound waves; he couldn’t hear the composition at that frequency, but he could feel it.

Still, he wished he could have water. The technickis would get word of it, though, if he had a water system installed. One of them would have to install it, after all. Their commentators would editorialize about wasteful luxuries among Admin elitists. Admin washunmunener filzerbush, they’d say. Admin washes in money and our air filter’s broken.