John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Then we’ll do it with camera surveillance and maybe a buddy system on visitors,” Stoner said. “But we have to do it.”

“Fine,” Claire said, telling herself to cool down. “You and Russ work up a brief on that for me.” Witcher was scowling now, she noticed. He wanted extractors. Maybe he wouldn’t be happy till he was on the Colony alone.

Chu went on to the next item, pay raises and improved housing for technickis.

Lester leaned forward. “Admin is falling behind on the timetable for reform.”

“We just haven’t got the resources to raise pay any further,” Claire said. “We’re cutting Admin paychecks considerably, as it is, in order to be able to afford—”

“Administrative positions are easier in some ways, and should not rate a better pay—” Lester began.

“Lester, I realize that you and Chu are ‘Reds.’” She used the slang term without denigration, saying it almost affectionately, the way an outsider would refer to the Amish. “But we are not all painted with the same brush here. I am just not a socialist. I believe that you need an incentive system for people to work hard.”

“When was the last time since the overthrow that you promoted a technicki?” His face had gone stony.

“There haven’t been any posts open. Be reasonable. It’s only been a short time. Trust us for a year, okay? Housing is improved—we have technickis moving into the Open almost every week.”

“But there is still a predominance of Admin people living in luxury in the Open housing projects—”

“I can’t just evict those people. The damage to morale… those people have children.”

“So do technicki families.”

He might have said, So do I. Claire admired Lester because he’d refused to move into a house offered him in the Open though she knew he longed for his wife and child to have a comfortable home. He wouldn’t go “till all technickis have decent housing.”

“We’re building, Lester, as fast as we can. There’s an ecological balance in the Colony’s parklands, and there are quality-of-life considerations—we don’t want to overdevelop. We’re building as much as we can, and we’re going to build a new section onto the Colony this year.” He opened his mouth to object again, and she broke in, “I’ll tell you what—I’ll meet with the union personally, offer them a better timetable for reform, and we’ll vote on it, set up a two-year schedule. It’s what we should have done anyway. We’ll find the middle ground.”

Lester held the hardness in his expression for two more beats. And then let it soften into a sardonic smile. “I guess I just been finessed. But okay.”

“I didn’t finesse you, Lester. You’ll see.” She turned to Chu. “Anything else pressing? I’ve got to get to the Comm center.”

“Nothing else.”

“Class dismissed!” Claire said, standing.

She hurried, out, feeling she couldn’t wait any longer: she had to contact Dan. Thoughts of Dan Torrence had distracted her too often. She needed to discharge them in some way so she could concentrate on her work.

Stoner caught up with her at the elevator, stepped on with her. “Hey,” he said when the doors closed. “You going to message Haifa?” Meaning their Mossad contacts in Israel: the message conduit to the New Resistance in Europe.

She nodded, and he handed her a datastick. “I was going to get permission from you for a message—could you transmit that for me and then erase it? And listen—before you scramble it, read it when it comes up on the screen. I thought maybe you should know my thoughts… No real emergency, but—I wanted to keep you up to speed.”

“Sure, okay. But what’s it about?”

“Just… read it. The whole thing.”

He got out at the next floor. Thoughtfully, she watched him go. He had seemed to be saying something more than he was saying out loud.

In the Comm Center, she booted up the message file Stoner had given her and read it. Intelligence reports, none of it really arresting. But at the end, she found what he’d been talking about; something earmarked for Smoke and Steinfeld:

Witcher keeps popping up with blank spots. He’s covering something from me, and being pretty cagey about it. It’s nothing I can call him on. I don’t think it’s any kind of special relationship with the other side. His hostility for the SA is almost pathological. But some of his own operations (including Orange County Research operations) are still opaque to me. Also, he says things that worry me. I quote verbatim: “The trouble with the world is there are too many people on it to manage. It could be a utopia, it really could, a place of racial harmony, all the races living in peace and complete equality, if there were only, say, a few million people to administer…” The guy means: a few million people on the whole damn planet. I don’t know, maybe it’s just paranoia on my part. Maybe it’s nothing…

“So, where’s Steinfeld?” Roseland asked.

“He’s in Egypt, trying to get us some backup,” Dan Torrence said.

“He’s not going to be here for this?” Roseland said. “Christ!”

“‘Christ’? Some Jew you are.”

“Okay, okay: Moses! You happy? Me, I’m not so happy, I mean, this is delicate, isn’t it? It’s not that I don’t trust you to—I—” Roseland fumbled for words.

“I know what you mean. I wish he was here too. We’ll do all right, man.”

They were crouched in the rooftop blind, close but not too close to the high-rise concentration camp, watching the skyline, ready to give the signal to the others. It was a warm, gently breezy night. Paper trash scraped and fluttered on the rooftop outside.

Some Jew you are, Torrence had said. His idea of a joke. Not a racist joke, just a weak one. Roseland’s own sense of humor had only started to come back to him in the last week. You needed strength to make jokes. Torrence seemed to feel a little threatened by Roseland’s humor, felt he had to contribute from time to time. An uncle of Roseland’s, old Dave Meyers, used to say, “People without a sense of humor shouldn’t try to be funny.” And it was true of Torrence. Not much of a sense of humor. But you didn’t tell “Hard-Eyes” things like that…

Anything, apparently, to avoid thinking about what was coming. Roseland dreaded it. Dreaded going to PC 13. Dreaded seeing the blood of the innocent mixed with the blood of the guilty.

Just do it, he told himself. Just do the job.

Torrence was looking fixedly through the slat. Roseland saw him tense; or sensed it somehow, in the dark. Heard him speak into the headset. “That’s it, it’s the change of the guard. Tourists, take your pictures.”

There was a staticky snip of reply, and then Torrence’s gun clattered against his gear as he moved out the back way. Roseland followed, his own rifle on its strap across his back, and in minutes they were climbing out through the first-floor window, into the little, narrow street behind the building where the others in the first assault team waited.

Pasolini was there, and Musa and Jiddah, and a French woman, Bibisch: a pale, lanky, long-faced woman who almost never spoke, but cared for her submachine gun lovingly. And others Roseland hadn’t got to know much yet. There was a moment when they clustered on the corner, in the light from the full moon; they stood next to the window of a deserted butcher’s shop, waiting for Torrence, who conferred with other assault teams on the headset. And in that moment Roseland found himself looking at his own reflection in the glass of the shop. Roseland had been eating modestly but regularly, and his face had filled out some; usually he looked almost healthy but not in this reflection. In the muted light, his reflection in the dark glass was hollow-eyed, cadaverous, his face a thing of shadows and sallow planes. As if he were looking out from the dimension where dead things dwell, he thought. The way he’d looked in the concentration camp they’d called a processing center.