John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“You’d better run a check for antigens, especially viral agents.”

Maynard looked around nervously. “Germ warfare?”

“Chances are slim, but check.” They wouldn’t have used one of the viruses; they wouldn’t want to tip anyone off about them. They didn’t know the New Resistance was aware of their viral program; and they didn’t know about Witcher’s contact in their lab. At least, last he knew they didn’t…

Witcher had to wet his mouth, working up saliva, before he could talk. “Anybody hurt?”

“Your whole kitchen staff. Most of them dead.”

Witcher shook his head impatiently. “I mean the girls. ”

“They’re okay, they were out on the grounds, on the other side. They’re checking the fences now.”

“Okay. Get on the fone in the limo, get some paramedics out here, then get the chopper warmed up. We’ll risk the sky. I want out of here fast.”

“Where to?”

Witcher hesitated. The Second Alliance was behind the attack, of course. They had decided to take the offensive. They were tired of playing with his intermediaries. His funding was the lifeblood of the resistance. They were trying to slash the artery.

He had to get way out of range.

“Book me on a shuttle to FirStep. ”

Maynard blinked. “The Space Colony? Seriously?”

“Seriously. Have the girls go to my suite in The Waikiki till I send for them. Tell Russ Parker I’m coming out. And get yourself bandaged up. See a doctor when he comes.”

Maynard turned to go.

Witcher called after him. “Maynard—make that shuttle ticket a one-way.”

It had taken Barrabas all morning and half the afternoon to get clearance for Lab Six. Interrogation, extractor mind searches, more psych profiles, sheer bureaucratic suspicion. He was afraid they might have stumbled onto his misgivings about the Second Alliance, his dislike of the boy Jebediah, and his mistrust of their reverence for aristocracy. But they hadn’t followed up the right chains of associations, it looked like, because here he was at last, walking into Lab Six with the albino.

“It’s such a relief to be back in England after Paris,” Cooper was saying. “You can’t get a proper biscuit there, and they have no understanding of heated housing.”

“Oh, yes?” Barrabas said, thinking he was expected to say something. He was tired from all the interrogation, from trying to defend himself without being defensive. It was like balancing on a narrow tree limb in a wind.

Both men were wearing white lab jumpsuits. They walked down a hallway done in dull-green tile and soft lights, with a temperature so exactingly controlled you never felt even a fractional change in temperature from the mean. Cooper, with his one pink eye and one blue eye, his dead-white skin and wispy thatch of white hair, had startled Barrabas when he’d first seen him. Naturally Barrabas had tried to conceal that reaction.

“I understand that you, ah, were slated for another kind of work for the Alliance,” Cooper said, superficially apologetic. “But the war, you see, has created a shortage of available technicians. We have to make do…”

Make do? Insulting, that was. But Barrabas shrugged it off as Cooper unlocked the double locks of the editing room.

“All this security is so tiresome,” Cooper said. “It really is an impediment, don’t you know.”

Digital editing equipment, white plastic consoles, and chromium interfaces filled most of the small editing room. A wall-size video screen stood beyond it. “Here’s your workstation,” Cooper was saying. “If some of the equipment is unfamiliar, we’ll try to get hold of the appropriate manuals.”

“I know the main unit here, but this other stuff…” Barrabas shook his head. “It’s like I tried to tell them, I had a year of video tech voccie and I worked about two weeks at VidEx before they went belly-up. I’m not real experience—”

“Oh, we’ll soon get you up to form. I’ve been doing some amateur editing myself, and I can operate the main unit. Some of the other stuff is a bit, ah, arcane…” He activated the machinery as he spoke, tapped rewind. “I was just going over the recordings when they called and said you were here, so we’ve got wizard timing, anyhow. We’re really not supposed to leave this material in the machines when we’re out of the room, but I locked it up and, ah, I only popped out for a few minutes. I doubt we’ve been infiltrated by spies in the last five minutes, eh? But Klaus and Colonel Watson aren’t much interested in common sense… Ah, here we are.”

He hit the play button and the screen rezzed up a slightly blurry image of the detention pens in the experimental center near Lyon. It was a down angle on three pens of wretched-looking prisoners, divided up along racial lines. Brown, black, white. “I suppose you’ve been briefed?” Cooper asked. “As to my, ah, work, I mean.”

“Well, no, not really. That is, a little. Psychological warfare against mongrel terrorists, they said.”

“Yes, ah, something along those lines. Amongst other things. I’m a social geneticist, you see. In this experiment we’re attempting to prove that racism is instinctive—not so we can tell the world, but so we can activate the instinct where needed and bring people around to our, ah, cause, don’t you know. Here we used increased survival-stress factors to promote racism between the three groups… I enjoy using the fast forward here.” He chuckled. “Watch.” He hit the button, and the video fast forwarded through several days of prisoner millings and interaction, so that the figures, seen from above, surged around and betwixt one another like beans in boiling water; whirling together, bouncing apart, a feverish human Brownian motion. “If you watch closely, you can see the pattern superseding over time, a kind of rhythmic surge, back and forth, between the pens, as they move in slow waves of aggression that gradually build up till we remove the barriers and they come together in Secondary Aggression—an outbreak of violence.” He slowed the images down so they could see the detainees in combat, race against race, maiming one another with teeth and fists and feet.

Barrabas’s stomach lurched. Be a man, he told himself.

“Of course,” Cooper went on, “these racist instincts are usually well under control in most people—it’s possible to condition them out entirely. And some people are resistant to them—they may lack that particular behavioral gene. You can see some of them hanging back.”

“What’s my part in all this?” Barrabas asked.

“You’ll be editing this recording with me, and some others, for presentation to the Inner Council. And to certain select individuals. Also, you’ll be helping me review video—we have some prisoners we regard as salvageable, if they’re racially appropriate. We check through the vid for the right bone matrices, the other indicators. A winnowing process, don’t you know…” He was switching feeds, going to another vid.

Barrabas watched with mounting discomfort as Cooper showed him studies of “degenerative behavior in Detention Center prisoners”; the “degrees of resistance and the submission points, in reference and contrast” as Jewish and black and Oriental and homosexual prisoners were tortured (one of those made him gag, something Cooper ignored—Cooper understood the need for workplace acclimatization) using techniques developed by the CIA and perfected by Chilean and Guatemalan secret police; experiments in “efficiency-execution of prisoners”; nerve-gas tests on prisoners; experiments in mind control on children separated from their parents under enhanced-trauma conditions and “undergoing behavioral reprogramming with negative/positive stimulus.” And then the last recording… of the squirming pink things.