John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Roseland took a deep, grateful breath of the open air. Only forty detainees were allowed outdoors at any one time, twice a week. It was Gabrielle and Roseland’s turn, with thirty-eight other “processing detainees” on the front steps or poking listlessly about the eighty-foot-wide compound.

He looked across the courtyard compound at PC 13, the almost identical high-rise, with another almost-identical group of detainees on its steps, huddled inside their own microwave fence perimeter.

(How remarkably alike they all became, at least to look at, after they were here for a while, Roseland thought. The same expressions, and the uniform imprint of hunger and sickness on their faces… And now he himself was beginning to perceive them all as alike as white mice or cockroaches. That was the triumph of the ones who had put them here: they were molding his own perceptions of himself, and the others.)

Roseland shivered, and coughed, and looked back at the microwave fence.

The microwave beams weren’t strong enough to hurt a trespasser on their own; they were triggers and orientation devices for the dual system of the Chubb CCTV surveillance cameras fixed on the sides of the two high-rises, and the contiguous Saab-Scania Datascan microprocessor system that controlled the aiming and firing of the four FN 7.62 mm sharpshooter’s machine guns, two on each building, mounted on 180-degree turrets…

There were SA guards too, three in an office on the second floor, usually playing cards or cursing the bad reception on their little satellite TV; wearing their armor but not their mirrored helmets. Sometimes taking one of the women in, sharing her around. Beating the ones who complained, beating the prisoners who protested.

There were two more guards supposed to be in the instabunker across the street, as often called out on scavenging errands, hustling wine and cheese to supplement the rations of the officers housed in the old pensione down the way. Just about half the time the bunker was empty.

But the Philips/Chubb/Saab-Scania security troika was never turned off, never took a break, never looked away—and it never made mistakes, as far as Roseland knew. It was smart enough to distinguish between SA and prisoners. An Iranian whose name Roseland had never known had tried to cut the power cables to the camera/gun turret. But the camera had stored power in it, and kept working, and the microchip-controlled gun across the street tracked over and shot the Iranian fifty times, as well as a woman who happened to look out a window nearby.

“You think there’s going to be another transport today?” Gabrielle asked. She’d learned English at the Université de Lyon and in America before the war. Her family had owned a string of patisseries, which had been seized by Le Pen’s people as “stolen property”: her parents, the SPOES government said, had “stolen business opportunities from native Frenchmen.” She had watched as her mother and father were taken away in the trainlike semi-trucks; a huge tractor-truck pulling six separate trailers, each with its microprocessor-controlled steering keeping it on a computer-imagined train track.

“Yes,” Roseland said, “they’ll be by again for more. They’ll take me next time, I think.”

“Do they take people to gas chambers?” She asked it lifelessly, as if asking whether there was a toll booth on a bridge ahead. After the guards had used her the vibrancy had gone out of her voice.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think there are gas chambers this time. I think they take you to work.” They’d taken her parents, so he didn’t tell her the rest: that they worked you to death. Literally to death, like a bar of soap (that inescapable irony) used to scrub—to scrub what? A prize pig?—used till it dissolved into nothing, was washed away and gone. And he didn’t tell her that some were taken for medical experiments; that all died, eventually, one way or another. That by now her parents were surely dead.

“Maybe the work—it’s better than here.” She didn’t sound as if she cared if it were better or not.

He thought about that. Maybe he should pretend to her that it was better. So she’d feel all right about her parents. But maybe not: then she’d try to get on the trucks and go, and she’d soon be dead.

“It can’t be better,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I think it’s death.”

“ Ma mama et môn papa, they are dead, I know, but maybe it is better than here.”

He hated the flatness in her voice. Like one of those old computer toys that talked to you when you pressed its buttons.

He swallowed. It was wet and clammy out, but his throat was so dry.

As a teenager, he had read about the Holocaust. The horror had been difficult to bear, so he hadn’t read widely in the subject, and he hadn’t tried to remember the details. To remember the event, the historical fullness of it, that was enough, he decided. That would not be forgotten.

But later he had read something else: that there were people claiming the Holocaust had never happened, claiming the exterminations had never happened, the monumental brutality had never happened. And there were people stupid enough—or politically opportunistic enough—to believe it, or pretend to believe it. And he had learned that the young in most countries, even those countries involved in the Second World War, were learning almost nothing of the Holocaust, and many didn’t believe it had happened at all…

The enormity of this stupidity, the insufferable amorality of this abdication of responsibility, this abandonment of history, had left the young Abe Roseland breathless.

He had gone back to the library and delved into the details of the Holocaust, so that he, at least, would remember.

He had read about the camps, and wondered what a great many others had wondered: why had there been so few rebellions?

The Nazi guns? Yes. But so few guns, relatively, and so many prisoners. Why not rush them, en masse, when you found out you were all going to die anyway, otherwise?

Now he knew the answer. Hunger.

Hunger became weakness and weakness was passivity. It was hard to think things out, hard to work in unison with others when you couldn’t think. Hard to make a decision and hard to find the strength to carry it out. Hunger was more effective than a thousand guards.

And the degradation, too, the shaving and the uniforms and the cattlelike herding and the random punishments. Techniques that worked on men and women like coring tools on apples. They cut the pith out of you.

They left you with nothing, or at best with a ghostly hope that something would break down, the Americans would get wind of it, Israel would come, the NR would come, or the Second Alliance and SPOES would realize it had gone too far and it would stop, or perhaps you could finesse your way into a servant’s job somewhere if you waited one more day, just one more day… Better to wait… better than rushing their guns…

It wasn’t better.

He said it aloud. “It’s not better.”

He stood up and said it again. “It’s not better.” And he said something else. “Not this time. Not again.”

Gabrielle didn’t even look up at him.

(How many months had he been here, trying to tell himself that it wasn’t what it seemed? That it wasn’t happening again? But he knew, some part of him knew, from the first day. The denial had died out in him about the same time the strength and the will for rebellion had drained away. Realization and resignation, coming together. So what had brought him out of it now, so suddenly after all this time? Was it Gabrielle? Yes.)

After the first rush of anger, Roseland felt weak in the knees, dizzy. Legs wobbly. He had a package of protein paste saved, thinking if ever the chance for an escape came, he’d need strength. He’d hidden it selfishly, back when they’d had the children with them; had watched children go hungry and hated himself, but he’d kept it hidden.