John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Still Smoke said no.

Torrence muttered that the reprisals were something personal; Watson and The Thirst, the bureaucratic sociopathic Giessen, had it in for him in particular.

Hearing that, Father Lespere had called him a solipsist and a mégalomane.

They talked him out of turning himself in.

But looking at Torrence now, Roseland thought that perhaps the Second Alliance had already won. Torrence was going through the motions. But in some sense, he was beaten.

“Jesus and Buddha in bed,” Hand swore under his breath, staring at the video mug shots. “That’s—”

“Shut up,” Bibisch hissed.

“They’re going to see those two,” Hand whispered. Visibly shaking.

“We’re too far away,” Roseland said softly. “The guards won’t recognize us from here. They probably wouldn’t, even up close. I’ve changed. Our boy Danny has his face pretty well covered.”

Hand took a deep breath. Roseland could see him suppress the panic. “I can’t believe this TV screen in the midst of all this… What the hell!”

The TV was showing an old movie. A French film about a heroic police commissioner’s fight against Arab terrorism. A few people from the huts trickled out to watch the movie, shading their eyes against the sun.

“A movie!” Hand said. “I don’t believe it! These people are half starved and living in huts that, as far as I can tell, are made out of shit, and they put this thing up! I mean, an installation like this is expensive.”

“And there’s a dozen of them in the city, and in the camps,” Roseland said.

“Mind control’s more important than housing and feeding people,” Torrence murmured in a rather distant tone.

Bibisch told Hand, “ Mais, they have given some housing to some people. They push Arabs and Jews and blacks out of houses, and give places to white people. Very simple housing plan. And on the other side of the camp it is different. They have metal houses—” She turned to Torrence. “What do you call it?”

“Quonset huts. With running water, chemical toilets, showers. Rations. Compared to tents or trash huts, they’re pretty decent short-term shelter.” He nodded toward the south; they could see the sun glancing off rows of gray metal humps on the far side of the camp.

“Well, that’s not so bad, then,” Hand said. “They’re working on it.”

“It’s only for the white refugees, Hand,” Torrence said wearily. “And only the loyal white people. The whites in the camp who aren’t loyal to the SA and the Party at the start soon learn to be.”

“Can we confirm that?” Hand asked.

Torrence nodded. “We’ll take you to see it. Talk to a few of them.”

“I’d like to get some video here…”

“We’ll smuggle your procam stuff in after things cool down.”

Hand looked nervously at him. “What do you mean, after things cool down?”

“I thought you wanted to see an NR action.”

“ Today? I mean, I thought we—Well anyway, I, yeah, I want to see one, but, you know, not from right in the middle of it. I was planning on shooting—camera shooting, I mean—from somewhere nearby. Somewhere safe. I’m a journalist, not a soldier. And I don’t have my proper equipment, just my fone-cam.”

Torrence looked at Bibisch, “I thought you said he wanted to come for this? Didn’t you tell him…?”

“Oh!” She pretended surprised remorse. “I have forgot. Merde! ”

Torrence almost smiled. Roseland chuckled. Hand looked at Bibisch accusingly. “You set me up to get caught in this! This your idea of funny?”

She looked at him wide-eyed. She didn’t like Hand. “I don’t know what you mean!”

Torrence sighed and shook his head at her. “You shouldn’t have done it. He’s important to us. He can get the truth out.”

She pouted a little. “It’s okay—he’s going to come out of it alive.”

“Or if he doesn’t,” Roseland joked cheerfully, “we can prop him up in front of the camera, use ventriloquism, maybe work a few jokes into the act.”

“That’s not very funny,” Hand said icily.

“Okay, I’ll leave that joke out.”

Hand turned with exasperation to Torrence. “What exactly have you got in mind? Am I going to get shot at?”

“With luck, no. Which is probably why Bibisch thought it was okay to drag you along. Come on, it’s all set up and we can’t waste it. They do a check of this place every so often and they might find it…”

Torrence set off into the maze of trash huts ringing the TV clearing, and led them to a sort of sod hut made of sections of sod covered with tarpaper and bits of plastic held in place with bricks and spikes of torn metal. It was bigger than most of the others. Two thin, shoeless men Roseland didn’t know, men in rags who looked Pakistani or Indian, were hunkered in the doorway, loosely gripping homemade spears made of broom handles tipped with sharpened nine-inch nails. They nodded at Torrence and moved away from the door.

“Go ahead and take off,” Torrence told them. They didn’t understand his English, but they knew the gesture he made with it. They seemed poised to go, but didn’t quite. Torrence reached into his coat, pulled out two US Army ration tins. “Almost forgot.” The men took the rations and disappeared into the piebald complexity of the camp.

The entrance hole to the large sod hut was facing the back of the other huts. No one was watching as Torrence pushed the burlap flap aside, and they went in.

Inside, it was dim but for a slat of sunlight coming through a narrow airhole in the dirt ceiling. There was a portable video transer and some other equipment on the hard-packed earthen floor; Roseland didn’t recognize most of it. It looked like a shortwave radio crossed with an old laptop. The Dell logo on the back of the display was smeared with dirt, or maybe dung.

The room was hot, and it reeked. Hand held a perfumed kerchief over his nose; Roseland wished he’d thought to bring one. You could get a bottle of expensive perfume fairly easily in Paris lately. It was much less expensive than a can of beans.

“Dammit,” Torrence muttered, “this stuff ought to be camouflaged somehow. Covered up, at least.”

“Should’ve been wrapped in plastic to protect it, too,” Hand said, trying to be one of the guys.

“Easy to say,” Roseland said, “but it was hard enough to smuggle this stuff in here. They probably didn’t feel like sweating the details.”

Bibisch squatted beside the equipment and switched it on. Its batteries were intact, it seemed. It hummed, and bits and pieces of it lit up with green light, including the small display screen. From his coat, Torrence took a datastick and handed it to Bibisch, who slotted it into the transer. She watched the readouts, made adjustments, tilted the antenna—which projected through a wall to look like a spike holding a bit of roofing in place—and said, “ C’est marche. ”

“What exactly,” Hand asked, “are we doing here? If it’s not too intrusive of me to ask.”

“Going to do some pirate transmissions,” Torrence said.

“Won’t they trace whatever it is you’re going to transmit? You know—trace it back to us?”

“There’s an interference-signal generator that should confuse their ability to triangulate us without losing our signal.” Torrence was talking distractedly as he watched Bibisch, trying to understand, Roseland supposed, the mystical rite of this technology. High-tech hands-on stuff was not Torrence’s strong suit.

Suddenly Hand jumped up, hitting his head on the low ceiling, capering about, scrabbling at the back of his neck. Yelling, “Shit! Get it out!”

Bibisch laughed. Torrence impatiently plunged his hand down the back of Hand’s sweater, plucked out a squirming cockroach big as his thumb, and tossed it out the doorway. Hand shivered, tugging his collar snug, and examined the ceiling. “This place is infested!”