John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Only, the stuff in the inhaler made Barrabas tense and vaguely headachey; it made his eyes itch and his nose dried out. Affected the way things looked to him, too.

Might be that was why the chapel looked like something from a bad dream. Or maybe it was the little blighter with the glittering blue eyes. Their speaker.

They had chapel every morning right before lunch. A bit of the C. of E. chapel was missing, part of the wall and ceiling, at one corner, crumbled in, behind the altar. You sat in the pew and at the end of the sermon, when the sun had moved around the sky some, you squinted against sunlight coming through the break in the wall. Somehow it was appropriate; the wounded church symbolized their sacred struggle, they were told, their sturdy faith still standing despite a crumbling world.

They’d left in the old stained-glass windows, those that had survived, but they’d put in a Second Circle cross on the altar. A big steel Christian cross, with the hologram attachment down at its base.

The boy Jebediah, with his two armored bulls for bodyguards, stood beside the cross, talking softly to the roomful of recruits; softly, but to Barrabas, somehow, the boy could almost have been whispering directly into his ear. The kid was like some toy action-figure in his scaled-down, immaculately tailored uniform: A flat-black uniform with black gloves and wide black belt; the Second Circle symbol on his arm patch: the eye over the cross. Jebediah had brown hair and deep-set glittering blue eyes, an almost girlish face and a voice that hadn’t changed yet, telling them, like a perfect little angel, “When I met Rick Crandall, everything changed for me, and I had the wonderful fortune to see what many adults never see.” Reciting it, but he had the trick of making it sound as if he’d never said it before. “I saw God’s divine plan for us. It’s all in one word. Purity.” A dramatic pause. “Purity is cleanliness, and if you’re not clean, you’re in sickness. As we’ve seen in the last several years, the world is in great sickness. What we have before us is the job of doing more than a little tidying. Purifying is a very strong word, and Rick means it in its absolute sense. He means the word to be strong!”

The kid was the Second Alliance’s idea of a kind of USO show, supposed to go around to all the troops and cheer them up. “Psyche you up good,” McDonnell had said. “So listen up.” Up, everything was up. Up the White Brotherhood.

Barrabas glanced around at the others. They were rapt; the kid had them in his soft, rosy little palm.

But to Barrabas, the kid seemed less like a sending from God. To Barrabas he seemed like a well-oiled robot. And maybe a bit around the bend. What ten-year-old kid could talk like this with such conviction and still be in his right mind?

Finishing, the kid said breathlessly, “God has put his sacred blueprint in each and every one of us. Behold.” The boy switched on the hologram.

Humming faintly, a three-dimensional representation of a DNA molecule shimmered into being around the stainless-steel cross. Above it floated an eye. “This is the configuration”—the kid, to Barrabas’s satisfaction, had a little trouble saying “configuration”—“of genes which can be found as part of the DNA chain of each and every man in this room. It is the distinctive DNA marking of the Upper Caucasian race. And as you can see, God watches over it. And in our own smaller way, it’s our job to protect it too…” And that was it. The kid led them in a hymn: “Racial Purity Is Thy Will.” Then he smiled shyly and turned off the hologram.

McDonnell, tears in his eyes like a little kid himself, prompted the recruits into a standing ovation and a hymn as the boy, carrying his hologram box under one arm and Crandall’s Corrected Bible under the other, was escorted from the chapel.

The service ended. Barrabas shook his head, walking out into sunlight. What had happened? That morning he’d been feeling good, feeling like a part of something bigger than himself, and loving it. Feeling strong in it.

But something—maybe the drug, maybe the sight of the self-righteous little prig talking about the genes…

Maybe that was it. All that talk of genes was too close to talk of breeding, which sounded like aristocracy. Class stuff. You had to stick with white people over the wogs, but this stuff about genes, that was right in line with notions of royalty. Set his teeth on edge.

“Barrabas!” McDonnell said, stepping up beside him. He took Barrabas by the arm and led him off to the side of the little group lining up for lunch. Barrabas was shaken: How had McDonnell known the treason he’d been thinking? Was it written on his face?

But it wasn’t that. “You’re getting your orders early,” McDonnell said, handing him the papers. “You’re going to Lab Six, up by London somewhere. They’re not giving out the location. Sending someone to pick you up.”

“What?” Barrabas blinked at him.

“You’ve got some kind of camera skills?”

“I did some video work, is all—”

“It’s that and they’ve decided you’ve got the right attitude or something. I didn’t get the lowdown.” He was a little apologetic. “You’ll see action later, you can count on it. They want you to vid some kind of experiment… He shrugged, and clapped Barrabas on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

He walked away. Barrabas stared after him.

He wasn’t going to Paris. He was going to… Lab Six?

He looked at the papers. Yeah. Lab Six.

Dan Torrence sat in a rotting easy chair with his feet up. Roseland glanced at Torrence, could see only his Hard-Eyes in a bar of harsh light coming through the slat. Roseland was hunched on a wooden box beside him. They were hunkered down in a blind made of trash. It looked like the rest of the roof: a trash heap, stuff thrown from the taller, adjacent building by some errant Soviet shell the previous year. Sheathed in damp cardboard, black plastic sacking, ancient broken rooftile, and a half-gutted mattress matted with a rain-gooey beard of stuffing, they watched through the shaded slats as the guards changed at Processing Center 13.

The night was almost warm, but it was damp in the blind and reeked of mildew. Roseland bent and peered through the lower slat, watched the Second Alliance bulls, seven stories below, gathered in a knot of high-tech body armor, talking, laughing. One of them had his helmet off, was smoking a cigarette. Roseland could just make out the coal of his cigarette, faintly pulsing as the guard inhaled. “They’re more armored than they were before,” Roseland said softly.

“Your breakout shook ’em up,” Torrence said.

Behind the glare of floodlights and beside the mound of rubble that had been PC 12, Processing Center 13 was shaped like a stubby high-rise made of rectangular shadows. Only one light was visible, at the guard’s office, second floor.

“You know, we’d never get tower evacuation before their reinforcements come,” Torrence said.

Roseland swallowed, a painful scraping in his dry throat. “There’s got to be a way.” He had to say what he’d been thinking, and had tried not to say, for too long. “You waited too long already. I mean—didn’t you guys know?”

“There aren’t very damn many of us,” Torrence said defensively. “Some of us sprang a work camp, up in Belgium. Four hundred refugees were killed. We lost forty fighters, man. We’re hoping that… well, we’ve got some people working politically. Trying to get the pressure on to stop this shit from the outside. While we concentrate on what Steinfeld calls pressure points.” There was a shrug in Torrence’s voice.