John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Blimey!” Barrabas burst out. Backsliding to old speech mannerisms in his shock. “What the bloody ’ell!”

Cooper was shaken himself, for, a different reason. “Not supposed to be on here. You weren’t supposed to…” His finger hovered over the off button. But then he shrugged and drew his hand back. “Well, you’ve, ah, seen them. You’ll have to see them eventually anyway, although we’d planned to do some further extractor work with you—we can always erase your memories later, I suppose.”

On the screen were half a dozen semi-human creatures. Squirming, wheezing, hairless pink things, rather like shaven puppies standing on their hind legs. But with flattened, slightly warped human features. They had hands too big for their arms, double-length fingers, receding foreheads—the skulls of chimps behind human faces—and shrunken human genitals. No nipples. They were a bit bigger than German shepherd puppies. As Barrabas watched, one of them defecated on itself, then scooped the stuff up in its fingers and smeared it on another creature’s back in a spiral pattern…

“These are our darling little subhumans,” Cooper was saying. “S-Human 6. Our sixth generation. I call them Puppies. People Puppies. They are rather like puppies, aren’t they?”

“What are they?”

“The work force of the future. Or, anyway, an early model of it. A prototype. They’re genetically engineered for certain characteristics… We’ve not got all the kinks out of the old DNA spiral, as you can see, but we’re working on it, coming along nicely. These are rather stunted, it’s true. Once the mongrel races and the otherbloods are eliminated, these subhumans will be needed to fill a certain, ah, economic niche. In a way they’re idiot savants—they’re animal-stupid on one level, bred to be entirely obedient, but on another they’re capable of being trained to do some kinds of skilled labor, like bricklaying, assembly-line work, plastic molding, garbage reclamation, even electrical work. They’re too mentally handicapped and passive to ever cause us any trouble. They can understand language up to a point, enough to take orders—but they can’t use language. They’re almost living robots. These, now, are rather stunted. They tend to die young, and they have faulty lungs, but they have a good attention span for instructions when they’re motivated with an electric prod. By the seventh or eighth generation—available in about three years, we hope—the subhumans will be workable. And one day the world will be divided between the Ideal Race and the Subhumans. There will be no other races. And this lot will never be capable of rebellion—not a bit. They’re marvelous, really, don’t you think?” Cooper turned to look at him.

Barrabas marshaled all his self-control and parrotted, in a rasp, “Marvelous.” He cleared his throat. “Um—will I be… working with them… in person?”

“Oh, but of course!” Cooper said cheerily, hitting the fast forward button. “Now that you’ve seen them.” The squirming pink things scurried around their filthy little pen like hyperactive maggots on legs.

Barrabas stared at the screen and took deep breaths, and after a while thought, Okay. I can go through with this.

But deep down, he wasn’t so sure.

From the outside, the six-mile-long Colony looked like a cylinder that had swallowed something too big to digest … The bulge at its middle was a Bernal sphere, itself a mile and a half in diameter. The concave interior of the sphere was to have been the main inhabitable area of the Colony. It was Pellucidar, the Hollow Earth: the landscape stretched away to an inside-out horizon, curving up when it should have curved down. The colony’s cylinder was pointed toward the sun, and reflected sunlight glowed from filtered, circular windows at the sunward end … The colony rotated once every five minutes, creating a subtle centrifugal artificial gravity for the thousands of people who lived in it, working at refining ore brought from the asteroids; working in the lowgrav areas on lowgrav specialty products; working on finishing the floating city in space—though it was a vast artifact designed to be never quite finished …

Claire Rimpler knew that something was wrong with Witcher when she shook hands with him. She could feel the telltale rubberiness of a sheath on his hand: a sort of condom for the hand, much tighter than gloves, nearly invisible, difficult to feel. And even with the sheath, he drew his hand back faster than was quite civil.

They stood in the Colony Administration conference room, beside a wall-size videoscreen and a table shaped like a backward S, making small talk as they waited for Russ Parker—actually, they were sizing one another up.

Witcher looked about forty, but he was much older; he had the slightly glossy look of a man who used cosmetic surgeons and glandularists, enzymologists, RNA retoolers to slow the aging process. He’d allowed a little silver into his long, neatly clipped brown hair and his small, geometrically perfect beard. He was a compact man in what looked like an astronomically expensive tailored suit of soft maroon leather.

Claire Rimpler was not quite diminutive, but nearly; she had, large, hazel eyes, short auburn hair, lips a little too large for her doll-like face. It was an appearance that might have made her seem a soft person, someone of negligible force—but she came across as the opposite. What I heard was, she’s no kill-virgin, someone had said when she’d come back to the Colony to take over the administrative reins; she had killed, and seen killing, seen enough to fill the lives of three generals, in the service of the New Resistance; her father, who had designed and run the Space Colony, had been first murdered and then cerebrally violated, portions of his brain used to interface with a colony computer, until the disastrous consequences.

Claire had left her lover, according to Witcher’s files on her—an NR operative whom Witcher knew slightly, Dan Torrence—left him back on Earth, to come here and take charge. And she was smart as a whip.

And much of that hard past, that lethal competency, was subtly present in her body language and her expression.

But when she smiled, you heard wind chimes.

She smiled at Witcher now and said, “It must be a comedown, your quarters, after what you’re used to. When Russ came back from your place on Kauai, he had palm trees in his eyes.”

“It’s kind of comforting here, actually, the smaller rooms,” Witcher said. “After someone has fired a missile at your house, you want to go to ground.” Adding distractedly, “And I’m close in where the gravity is light; it’s refreshing.” He was looking at the door as Russ Parker came in. Behind Russ came Lester and Stoner and Chu.

I was right about Witcher, Claire thought, watching him. The man was some variation of paranoid. It was like sitting with your back to the wall, being here, for Witcher. He doesn’t know how fragile the place really is…

Russ Parker was a stocky, red-faced middle-aged guy wearing real blue jeans and a blue printout shirt. It was gauche, supposedly, to mix printout and cloth clothing, but it was like Russ to be oblivious to that.

Lester, the technicki rep, sat at the table with Stoner and Chu, talking softly. He was a large man, black as the space between stars, wearing a comm tech’s gray zippered jumpsuit. His wife, Kitty, was a nondescript white woman who turned out to have enormous wellsprings of character. Chu, the brisk, intense Chinese woman who was now administrative secretary, was an NR organizer who had found out that Kitty was Dan’s sister: Dan Torrence’s sister! The coincidence was a little eerie. But maybe not so strange, really. In her way, Kitty was a fighter. She had fought for Lester. She had fought for her baby. She had fought for Russ Parker’s conscience, and she’d won it.