John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Torrence and Bibisch and Roseland and Hand were trudging along the rutted mud path winding through the camp, squinting in the unobstructed sunlight, talking softly. Summer had finally come to north-central France. They weren’t dressed for the weather. Most refugees simply wore everything they owned. Torrence and companions dressed in the unwashed, haphazard clothing typical of the refugees: Roseland wearing a promotional sweatshirt for participatory movie-software, on his chest a grimed, grisly solar-activated videoprint touting Psycho Sam, the Man With the Chainsaw Fingers ; Bibisch wearing a stained jogging outfit; Torrence wearing a thickly layered outfit of pieces of military uniforms, insignia removed, the whole too warm in the sunny afternoon but usefully concealing his weapons; Hand wearing a grungy blue sweater and torn khaki pants, mismatched Army boots.

They looked to be luxuriantly outfitted, Roseland thought, compared to the people squatting at the huts and shanties and tents around them. The starveling children, their faces dull as veal calves in an agribusiness pen, particularly depressed Roseland.

Children, he thought, were just adults that hadn’t come into focus yet, and it was probably stupid to feel more sentimental about them than about the adults who suffered here. Suffering was suffering. But inescapably he felt a special empathic sense of violation when he saw the children in the camps.

And there were so many homeless children in Paris; everywhere in Europe, children either dying before they were twelve or becoming murderous with their determination to survive. They were a rootless nation within a nation; a nation of the disenfranchised.

The camp stank, of course. At first there had been chemical toilets, brought by the puny efforts of the Red Cross. But when the Red Cross witnessed SA atrocities and complained, it had been excluded from the camps. The few sanitary facilities were overwhelmed by the numbers of the refugees, who had taken to digging open pits as privies. The flies were terrible, big and blue-black and so ubiquitous they seemed somehow spontaneously generated by the stench. That was a medieval notion, but then, Roseland reflected, medieval notions were apt here.

The refugee camp itself was a patchwork that refused definition by the eye. It gave the general impression of thousands of human beings living in a trash dump, occupying it like sea gulls on a barge. The path had been muddied during the rains, then hardened by the sun into something footprint-pocked, rutted, and cement-hard. Torrence and the others picked their way along the road, swiping at flies and trying to breathe through their mouths.

And then they came to the giant digital video screen.

“I don’t believe it,” Hand breathed. “What the hell is that thing doing here? The fucking thing is two stories high!”

It was. Torrence pulled his floppy hat lower over his eyes, trying to obscure his face, as they approached the clearing with the giant TV in it. It was big as two billboards stacked one atop another, a TV screen several stories high and broad as a barn: an absurd anomaly in a refugee camp. It was a glassy, chrome-edged section of the Grid, set onto a girderframe that was held in place by rock-hard insta, with orderly rows of folding metal chairs in front of it. The chairs were empty, but for an old woman who cursed incessantly to herself and a ragamuffin child toying with his genitals as he gaped at the screen. Four Second Alliance soldiers stood guard around the giant screen, two in back and two in front, the legs of their armored suits well apart and locked in place so they could lean on the suits inside; the suits were air-conditioned, quilted Kevlar-backed black fabric, mirror-reflective helmets locking their heads into insect anonymity.

On the video monolith rearing two stories over them, the talking head of the president of France yammered about the Unity Party. Every so often images of the French flag superimposed over his shoulder, alternating with shots of the small sections of Paris the Second Alliance and SPOES had cleaned up and rebuilt.

Then came shots of happy Parisian citizens at work on the “Volunteer Rebuilding Plan,” waving at the cameras and chatting companionably as they cleared rubble from shell-damaged buildings; as they replastered and repainted damaged walls, happily chatting, everyone cheerfully working without pay except for stamped coupons supposed to be good for food at a later date. Some unnamed later date…

Then came a short commercial for SPOES, with the Unity Party’s endorsement of the alliance that would give France “a new national strength.” Followed by a public service announcement warning about “anti-Unity Criminals.” There were mug shots and digitized re-creations of some of the “criminal” faces; many of them Roseland recognized from the NR. Most of them were black or Arab or Sikh or Hindu. The last two were white—but one of them was Jewish.

They were Torrence and Roseland.

A jet of chill air played along Roseland’s spine as he stared up at the two-story image of himself on the screen, running away from the processing center. The video computer had blocked out the people running on either side of him—people who were being shot down. There was just a profile shot of Roseland, and then full-face as he looked over his shoulder (he didn’t remember doing that; maybe it was a computer modeling), and into the camera. The image froze, close up.

A criminal who staged a massive jailbreak, they said. Watch for him. Report him. Or turn him over to a Citizen’s Justice committee. Which meant, betray him to the Fascist vigilantes, the brownshirts who roamed the street looking for scapegoats to brutalize.

They’d passed such a group on their way to the refugee camp. The brownshirts had looked at Hand as if they were considering kicking his ass for being Asian. But they were intent on some other mission. If they’d recognized Roseland from this video mug shot, they’d have jumped him, beat him to death.

But either they hadn’t seen the video or he looked much different now. His face had filled out and he’d grown a beard and long hair. He was going to have to do more to disguise himself.

And now there were the computer-enhanced shots of Daniel “Hard-Eyes” Torrence. Who was staring up at the images of himself, the two-story high digital wanted poster; gazing up at it with something beyond paranoia; something more in the category of awe.

A “terrorist responsible for the deaths of many innocents, possibly including the murder of President Le Pen.” A lunatic killer, they said. If you see him, don’t try to take him prisoner: send someone for the Second Alliance police. He’s highly dangerous.

Roseland was a little jealous of their special regard for Torrence.

Roseland glanced at Torrence, who was watching the video with no change in the expression he’d worn all day. It was a look of resignation and depression. He’d been like that since the Second Alliance had begun carrying out reprisals “for the activities of the terrorist Hard-Eyes Torrence.” Reprisals that were the true “murder of many innocents.”

Twice Torrence had made plans to turn himself over to the Second Alliance; twice Smoke and Roseland and Bibisch and Lespere had talked him out of it.

If Torrence turned himself in—or, more precisely, blew himself up on their doorstep—someone else would have to take his place as Steinfeld’s field commander. Someone else would do the same job, and someone else would be picked as “the cause of reprisals.” That’s what they told Torrence, anyway.

And then of course there was the extractor to think of. But Torrence insisted that he could be prophylactically extracted in advance, if they could get him to the Mossad—they could take out his knowledge of Lespere, and the NR’s safehouses.