John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

[ Witcher files note:The American psychologist who conducted the interview and composed the preceding report was recently stripped of his standing by his colleagues for his racist papers on what he called “The Sociobiological Foundation of the Caucasian Imperative.”]

Patrick Barrabas was marching through a ground fog with twelve other men. They were marching in close formation behind their American trainer. Barrabas was a short, muscular young man. At five foot four and a half, he was a bit touchy about his height. He had good looks: bright blue eyes, wavy red-brown hair, pretty but masculine features—“You should have been a digi-star,” his last girlfriend had told him. That had salved his ego a little. He wore a flat-black SA trainee’s uniform with infantryman’s green plastic boots, carried an SA/Jæger Mark 3 assault rifle, one of the new “smart” rifles, with its special ordnance launcher and microprocessors for aiming and heatseeking and warning you when it was overheated or dirty. But it didn’t yet have a battery—or ammunition—more’s the pity.

Barrabas was beginning to feel at home in Swinshot, decrepit though it was. Swinshot was the flesh-plucked skeleton of a rural village northwest of Southampton. The New-Soviets had made only tentative forays into England, low conventional bomb runs over military installations. Either confused military intelligence or bad aim made harmless, bucolic Swinshot the target of a carpet-bombing raid. As if synchronicity had arranged another delicious irony, the few surviving buildings were the only ones with any strategic value: the post office still stood, and the city hall, and the police station. The school and the clinic and the old people’s home and most of the houses in Swinshot—all were devastated. One of the chapels still stood, only half-caved-in. The village’s survivors had been relocated by the government.

The intact buildings were unoccupied, except the chapel, and City Hall, which had been turned over to the company that had been given unofficial-and-yet-official use of the Swinshot area: the Second Alliance International Security Corporation.

And Patrick Barrabas had worked for them, training here… how long now? He totted it up in his head as he did a smart about-face, making the mist churn. About eight weeks now. Work? It was more like boot camp, he thought. But he had come to like it.

They were strange people to work for. Clever people, the way they’d put it all together—a security company, a political movement, a religion rolled into one. The SAISC was in hot water in the States, it was said, but in England the corporation openly advertised its services on the BBC like any other company.

When Sparky put him up for the job, he’d thought he was going to be a security guard somewhere. Something dull. But then come to find out there were wheels within wheels, in the SAISC…

You couldn’t just apply to work for them like any other company. Which was strange as well, because there was a shortage of able men to work in the U.K. after the war, and most companies had people stopping you on the street to hand you an application—but not the SAISC. And there was no SAISC personnel office. You had to know someone on the inside. And then they talked to you till you thought you were going to drop from exhaustion. Made you talk to a shrink. And they put you under the extractor thingie, and maybe they said yes, and if they did, well, here you were.

Marching in a bloody private army, through the rubble.

He’d missed NATO military service with his high lottery number, but he’d have gone, eventually, if the war hadn’t ended. When it ended he’d felt a stab of irrational disappointment. A war like that, chances were you’d get yourself killed. Hundreds of thousands had. But afterward, you didn’t feel quite a man if you hadn’t gone, stupidly trite as that was. It was a feeling you couldn’t quite get away from.

He felt better about it now, tramping in step through the morning fog. The sun rising to the east was burning mist off the broken roof of the old chapel. Off to the south, beyond the fallow rye field, a mistletoe-choked oak woods looked grimly dark, as if it were still night within its hoary confines.

“Barrabas, dammit!” McDonnell bellowed at him. “Keep your eyes straight ahead! Did I tell you to gawk at the fucking landscape?” The red-faced, pig-eyed American trainer with his buzzcut hair and almost lipless mouth was tramping along side by side with Barrabas now. Barrabas savored it. He was perfect, even his ugly face. Just like a Marine D.I. in the movies.

Barrabas snapped his eyes forward, suppressing a grin. He liked this “job,” he definitely liked it.

“You are working as part of a fine-tuned machine, Barrabas! You can’t do your part without paying attention, fuck-face! What do you think we are, here, eh? A lot of individuals? Like fucking Bohemians? Like bloody anarchists? You’re just a part of the outfit! We’re all one unit or you end up dead, shot in the back by guerrillas!”

“We’re never quite one unit here,” Torrence was telling them. “We work together, but we have to be as autonomous as possible, too, partly because we often get separated. There aren’t very many of us. Your determination to complete your mission has got to come out of something personal in you, you know?”

Roseland nodded to himself. It felt right.

Roseland and the other guerrilla trainees—mostly French Jews, some Algerian immigrants, a couple of Americans, an Israeli who’d been stranded here, and a Dutch woman—sat on the cold floor in the ring of the lantern light, in a semicircle around Hard-Eyes. Rifles leaned against the dusty crates behind them; the weapons, gathered piecemeal from here and there, were as variegated as the nationalities of the trainees. Ammunition that’d work for everyone was a perpetual problem.

“Certain fundamentals of our overall strategy will be kept from you, though,” Torrence went on. “And information about the whereabouts of some safe houses, weapons, observation posts, people who work with us—that is, you know only about the ones you have to know about. Because of the extractor. An extractor extracts information directly from your brain, electrochemically, whether you like it or not. Extractors are expensive—they don’t always have one, not right away. And then there’s torture, when they don’t have access to an extractor, or if your brain chemistry is extractor-resistant. Some people seem to be. But no one is immune to torture. Everyone, eventually, spills whatever they know under torture. Don’t kid yourself.” He paused to sip weak coffee from a blue plastic mug. “We keep what we can from you, but you already know a lot that can hurt us. You know about Lespere. He’s a valuable man. He’s got them convinced he’s an enthusiastic collaborator. A racist, an enthusiast for the National Front and the Unity Party. He’s got the confidence of Larousse himself. And yet you know about him, about what he really is, because he’s part of your training. You’re not to speak of him outside this circle: not everyone in the NR knows about Lespere—you do, because you’re the Point Cadre. Lespere will be using you, directing you—Lespere and I both—for special actions. You’ve been chosen for your strong motivation…”

Why, Roseland wondered, did Lespere have to be part of training? If he was so important, they should leave that to someone else and keep his complicity a secret.

Roseland, thinking about Lespere, suspected he knew. There was a sense of release about whatever Lespere did with the guerrillas; a sense of tensions easing. As if he were letting go, acting out something he needed to get out of himself.

Roseland figured that Lespere insisted on taking part. It was how he kept his sanity after having to chum it up with Nazis, maybe even take part in their genocide in some way. Lespere was a deeply humane man. His conscience led him to the undercover work for the NR; his conscience led him to become a monster.