John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

And Dan, as of a few weeks now, was an uncle. She’d have to get word to him somehow, she reflected, as they all sat down. Dan needed cheering up. But it was hard to get word into Paris. There was a Mossad line of communication that could be used sometimes. Witcher could set it up for her perhaps.

Claire ached to talk to Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence. Every morning, charging into her workday, she told herself she should forget him, let her feelings for him die on the vine. He was a guerrilla in a hotbed of fascism. It was like being an active resistance partisan in Hitler’s Berlin. His chances for survival—especially with extractors around to help ferret him out—were microscopic. She’d probably never see him again. Thinking about him, worrying about him, took her out of focus here.

So every morning it was, Today I forget about him.

But at night she curled up, fetuslike, around an ache shaped like his name.

She felt not only lonely for him, but guilty for having left him to take this job. She’d been the only one he could open up to. Without her, he had to stay in that hard shell all the time. Emotionally claustrophobic…

Unless he had already found someone else. There were other women in the resistance—and New Resistance women didn’t waste any time; they went after what they wanted.

Chu broke into Claire’s thoughts as she read the minutes of the last meeting, then went directly to the major topic for this one. “Security. Mr. Witcher has some concerns.”

“We’ve all got some concerns in that direction, I think,” Stoner said. He was a paunchy, wide-shouldered man with thinning grease-slicked hair and a face that was bland except for bright blue eyes. He wore an antique cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps and cowboy boots. He’d had to flee the CIA when the agency’s racist collaboration with the SA had “stuck in his craw.” Stoner and Russ Parker had hit it off despite some fundamental contrasts. Parker was a Christian and Stoner wasn’t; Stoner was a family man, come here with his black wife and child, and Parker was a longtime bachelor; Stoner was a northerner and Parker a southerner. But both were older men with a nostalgia for the middle twentieth century, and the somewhat mythical values of the American West.

And both of them had turned their lives upside down for the sake of conscience. Russ Parker had left the employ of the SA, staged a successful mutiny that had overthrown the Fascists who had wormed into power at the colony; Parker’s coup had become an administrative fait accompli. UNIC—the United Nations Industrial Council, a multigovernmental consortium that oversaw the Colony from Earth—accepted the unauthorized transfer of power. The Colony coup coincided with the discrediting of the Second Alliance International Security Corporation in the United States. UNIC perceived it was saved some political embarrassment. Parker had kept the putsch quiet.

“I’ve been debriefing Percy Witcher here,” Stoner was saying, “and it appears that there’s been a recent attempt on his life.” He went on to outline the missile attack on Witcher’s Kauai stronghold.

Chu said, “I don’t wish to seem inhospitable, but… the Colony is in some respects a fragile thing. If they want to get to him badly enough, they might be willing to sacrifice the Colony’s inhabitants.” She shrugged. “They’re willing to exterminate half of Europe if we let them. Why not the few thousand we have here?”

Russ pointed out, “Mr. Witcher is a major Colony stockholder, as of just about one month ago today, and without him the New Resistance just would not have gotten a single foothold. He’s been protecting us, and to me it’s pretty damn obvious it’s the good Lord’s will that we reciprocate.” His faint Texas accent was charming, Claire thought, but the reference to his Christianity embarrassed her. Primitive stuff.

Claire said, “The Second Alliance is well aware that the Colony is resistance-sympathetic now. We’re their target either way, I’m sure.”

“Anyway, I don’t think they’ve made him here,” Stoner said. “He covered his tracks pretty well. Used fake ID, arranged decoy ‘appearances’ in New York while he was at the launch site in Florida…”

“I’ve got confirmation about an hour ago: they’re still looking for me in New York and Boston,” Witcher said. “They don’t know I’m here.”

“They will find out,” Chu said. “But it is true: we are quite possibly targets anyway.”

“The Colony is not a balloon,” Claire pointed out. “If you puncture it in one spot, it won’t all burst. My father built it with section integrity, so that if one section loses air pressure or becomes a danger in some other way, it’s sealed off. It would take a large nuclear device to really devastate the Colony. It could be crippled, though, in other ways—if someone hacks into the life-support system.” She paused, feeling a tug as she remembered the strange, posthumous sabotage her father had wreaked on the Colony. The others knew what she must be thinking about, and respectfully said nothing till she cleared her throat and went on. “It’s expensive, attacking us up here—from the outside.”

Stoner nodded sharply at the implication. “You got it. What we got to worry about is internal. The SA wants to get us, it’ll be from the inside.”

“What you need,” Witcher said flatly, “is a freeze in hiring. For starts.”

“That suits the union,” Lester said. “Except in external repairs—they’re shorthanded, after the RM17 thing…”

“They’ll have to make do,” Parker said. “We can’t risk bringing in anyone new right now.”

“How many have you brought into the Colony in the last month?” Witcher asked.

“Maybe a dozen,” Claire said.

“How about tourists?”

“We aren’t letting them through yet, till we’ve finished repairs.”

“I recommend you don’t let them through at all until the SA problem is… resolved.”

Lester blinked. “T’ers!”

Witcher grimaced with impatience. “I really don’t speak Technicki.”

“Sorry. I said, it’1l take years!”

Witcher shrugged. “It’s the only safe course. And not just safer for me.”

“I reluctantly have to agree,” Stoner said. “No tourists—no stopover people…”

Claire shook her head. “It’s not realistic. We can’t control who the Lunar Mining Corporation hires. And their people have to stop in here when they make the trip.”

“Then we’ll have them interrogated, and watched.” He hesitated, looking at Witcher. “Extractors might—”

“No!” Claire snapped, hitting the table with the palm of her hand. “Those things are the tools of fascism.”

“Both sides use them,” Witcher said.

“It doesn’t matter! The NR shouldn’t use them! It’s inviting fascism when the Resistance uses them! It’s laying the groundwork for a future fascism. It’s just wrong for any government to have access to a machine that can… can violate your inner thoughts, your memories! The right to privacy is the right to freedom, my dad used to say. Extractors ought to be outlawed everywhere.”

“They might be usefully employed by psychologists,” Chu suggested tentatively.

“Psychologists will just have to get by without them, if it’s up to me. No, I won’t have them. I’ll resign—”

“Whoa, slow down, honey,” Russ said hastily. “No one’s put in an order for an extractor.”

Claire had been doing an awe-inspiring job as administrator; no one wanted to lose her. She’d facilitated rapid repairs on the damage done to the Colony during the rebellion. She’d smoothed the transition to a redress of the balance of power so that technickis, the Colony’s working class, were able to move up without much resistance from the Admin minority. She was a general and a politician both.