John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Then a scream muted by transmission—and another monitor blotted out.

“Why not bring a second Jægernaut to bear?” Giessen suggested.

Watson spun on him, spraying spittle in his fury, taking his frustration out on Giessen. “Because, damn you, we have only one other here, and it’s the bleeding wrong end of town! We can’t run it through the middle of town! The French went half mad when one of our lads rubbled their bloody Arc de Triomphe. The Jægernauts are to be used to attack cities fully occupied by an enemy—they’re a weapon of siege! We’ve had a cunt of a time doing damage control on that one, lying through our bloody teeth—we can’t plow through the middle of town, those things destroy wherever they go…”

“I see, of course, they need a special route. It was a bad suggestion, Herr Watson.” Giessen gave a thin, maddeningly patronizing smile.

Klaus was listening tensely on the fone; Watson could tell he was getting something nasty. “Well, what is it, Klaus?”

“Their trucks! The Jægernaut completely routed our boys and the guerilla trucks are away. They’ve quite escaped with their load of Jews and Negroes…”

Sometimes human planning lines up neatly with chance; sometimes synchronicity vibes sympathetically; sometimes there is serendipity.

When it happens, you have a holiday from fear, you can lie to yourself cheerfully about how it’ll all turn out. (And sometimes, it does indeed turn out well. Sometimes.)

When Torrence returned to the safe house, he found he was resonating sweetly with things for the first time in a year or two. First there was a sense of relief: they’d taken the refugees to the meeting place where they were turned over to those who’d agreed to take in the stronger escapees—taken in by hundreds of decent Parisians who were among the NR’s “auxiliary.” The most grievously ill were taken by the “underground train”—carried on stretchers, through the old Metro tunnels—to the north of the city, where other partisans waited to take them to outlying hospitals and sympathetic doctors. It had taken a long, difficult while to organize, and it had gone off well, and they had been lucky.

Another serendipity: Smoke had been at the meeting place, an artillery-ruined square in the north of Paris where the evacuation trucks left off their long-suffering human cargo. Smoke, and an American newscaster named Norman Hand.

Hand and his technicki assistant had videoed the refugees, interviewed those who could talk. With enormous satisfaction, Smoke watched Hand’s skepticism melt into horror.

Then had come the safe house, which seemed warm and snug after the “bullet weather” of the firefight. They had the space heater going, and the six male refugees they’d recruited were fed warm broth and a little rice—Roseland fed them, almost weeping from happiness and release—and Torrence thought: If we don’t accomplish anything else, we’ve made this difference. Hundreds freed from the Fascists. Among them, some children.

He was just sorry they’d had to blow up the Jægernaut. He’d been tempted to try to get it to Second Alliance headquarters, use it to stomp them good, turnabout is fair play. But the Jægernaut would have crushed civilians, getting there. So, instead, they’d used it to mangle a couple of roads and railroad lines important to the Fascists, and then trashed it.

Now he sat in a corner near the rattling electric heater and ate his soup, his thoughts turning to Claire—and to his sister Kitty.

Kitty had a new baby, was working with her husband on the Colony; both of them happy with their promotions, proud of having come through hell together. Kitty was doing all right. That was something else to hold on to.

Claire’s letter had come off affectionate, but also a little irrationally petulant. As if she was reproaching him for hanging around in her head when she was trying to get some work done. He would have liked the letter to have at least hinted at romance. Maybe she was deliberately forgetting their intimacy. She seemed to suggest that he should find some other… outlet.

When you have time, just live, she’d told him. Try to feel some warmth, even though I know it’s hard to do there. Try to get close to people. That’s survival, too.

He was still pumped up from the fight, the escape, the sight of the Jægernaut coming down like a slaughterhouse hammer on the swine at the Detention Center. He was almost high on the knowledge that they’d made a material difference…

It was hard to just sit here and watch the others; watch Smoke and Hand talking to the refugees and Pasolini cleaning her weapon—as she tried to be an example of the perfect soldier, another overcompensating female—and Musa and Jiddah, half-seen through the door into the next room, on their knees, praying toward Mecca. And Bibisch…

Who sat down beside him, dipping a bit of sourdough bread into her bowl. She glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes, then looked fixedly back at her soup.

Oh, he thought.

Well, she was pretty enough. Curly black hair, delicately elongated Frankish features, softly brooding gray-blue eyes; very handsome, her face, if a little dour. She wore shapeless clothes, as all the women here did, so it was hard to know if…

He winced, mentally imagining Claire telling him off for his sexist speculation. For wondering about Bibisch’s tits and ass. Her legs.

Demeaning, Claire would say. And she’d be right.

But still, he wondered how those long legs looked in moonlight…

Synchronicity, serendipity: Bibisch suddenly turned to him and said, “Did you see the moon? It is so bright tonight. The clouds blow away, the moon come in, c’est tres jolie.”

“Yeah, saw it when I was coming in.”

“You look… happy. This is abnormal for you, yes?”

He smiled. “Yeah, well, I’d be pretty fucking abnormal if I was happy around Paris nowadays, Bibisch.”

“Your fucking is abnormal?” She seemed interested.

“That’s not what I meant, it’s just an—Forget it. You know, I didn’t know you spoke much English.”

“I am not very good on it, so I do not like to, you know…” She shrugged. Inconspicuously, she moved closer to him.

“Your English is better than my French.”

“ Toujours. Bad English is better than bad French. French, c’est fragile.” She said it “frah -sjheel.” The French pronunciation bringing onomatopoeia.

An outburst from Norman Hand distracted them. “I still can’t believe this could be going on without NATO and, I don’t know, without the UN knowing about it.”

Smoke said patiently, “I’ve told you: they know about some of it. But there was a war on, Hand, remember? There are hundreds of thousands of refugees, there are destroyed economies, there is starvation in pockets all over the continent, there is pestilence, there are bands of paramilitary groups jockeying for power, factions fighting for control—the so-called international ‘authorities’ are dealing with all that, they can’t sort out the SA-created suffering from the suffering that comes from the aftermath of war. They’ve got their hands full. They can’t see the goddamn forest for the trees. We need you to bring this out where people can see it.”

There were two rail-thin Oriental men among the group of refugees from the concentration camp; one of them tried to explain things to Hand in Korean, rattling it off arcanely for a full minute as Hand tried to tell him, “I’m not Korean! I don’t understand! I’m Vietnamese!”

The other Oriental sat up excitedly. “Vietnamese! Me Vietnamese!” Then he reeled off a couple of feverish paragraphs in Vietnamese.

“I’m Vietnamese, but I don’t speak Vietnamese!” Hand protested weakly.