John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Sometimes she intimidated him. She had come back from Earth with a real edge to her. She’d seen things there that had hardened her, sharpened her. But when she was happy, the woman shone out of her like Texas starlight, and man, he just wanted to…

You too damn old for her, Rusty, he told himself.

When Lester was done, Claire nudged Parker, and he went awkwardly to the mike, wincing at the paper noise as he unfolded his notes, read out his short speech in Standard. Claire, the show-off, did hers in Technicki. They cut the ribbon, strolled through the multidwelling units to drink punch at the reception in the project’s Community Center.

Claire and Parker stood together, chatting with Lester’s wife, Kitty; Lester strolled over and Claire muttered, “Uh-oh. He’s got that rhetoric look in his eye.” Kitty chuckled; Parker inwardly groaned.

“You know,” Lester said, pinning Parker with his challenging stare, “we got some momentum going here, zeal for reform and all that, Maybe we should use it, keep going. Reform the economic infrastructure of the Colony.”

“Lester,” said Parker, “do you really think that if you put it up to a popular vote people’d vote for a socialist state in the Colony? Come on. Most technickis are more or less of Democratic Party persuasion, not radicals.”

“Especially in light of the changes lately,” Claire said. “Things are working for them as is.”

“No,” Lester said. “Things are easing for them. That doesn’t mean that things are really fair. There’s still a class structure here; there’s still under-representation; there’s still salary inequities. Admin’s not treating them like indentured servants anymore—more like… like ordinary servants with a ‘liberal’ employer.”

“Reform’s ongoing,” Claire said. “I’d like to see it go farther—Maybe we do need some kind of Democratic-Socialist structure. In a moderate kind of way. I think your health care should be completely subsidized and not come out of your paycheck; I think housing should be more broadly subsidized. But socialism per se is just too archaic for this kind of environment, Lester.”

“Socialism isn’t archaic any more than the principles of engineering are archaic—they get refined as people learn how to build things better, but the basic principles…”

It went on like that for a while, ending with everyone agreeing to think about it. Lester didn’t seem angry that they hadn’t jumped on his bandwagon, but he could be pretty inscrutable; it was hard to tell for sure.

After Lester’s wife rescued them, dragging him off to help her with the baby, Claire said, “I’ve had enough politics for one day. Feel like taking a walk, Russ?”

Hell, yeah.

There was weather in the Colony. Understated weather, but weather still. Some of it was deliberately contrived by Life Support Systems, some of it was an accident of the Colony’s design and internal cycles. There was some clouding and mild, misty precipitation in the Open; there was a little smog sometimes, from the imperfect air filtering. The rotation of the Colony, with changes in temperature as the solar wind basted its turning sides, led to breezes produced by shifting air-pressure. Today, with the windows adjusted to let in more sunlight than other times of year, and with the evaporation from this morning’s irrigation, it was rather humid, making Parker think of Dallas.

“What I want right now… is ice cream,” he told her as they strolled down the path through the thin woods, watching potbellied “Frisbee athletes” gliding plastic plates to each other on the grassy field beyond the treeline.

“Might give you some, you play your cards right,” she said.

“You got ice cream? Since when did that ship in?”

“It didn’t. I made it. My dad had a hand-crank ice-cream maker.”

“And you’ve been hiding this from me! Boy, I tell you, there’s nothing to this old-boy stuff among the Admin people if you’re any example! Where’s my damn share of your decadent perks?”

“You got to exercise to earn it. Ice cream’s fattening. When it’s humid like this, I like to go to the freefall rooms, do some air tumbling, work out a little. It’s not much fun alone, though. You want to come?”

“Uh—sure. I guess. I haven’t been but once…”

“Elevator for that section’s at this end of the woods.”

Parker followed her onto a crosspath, toward the curving wall, recently cleaned of most of its graffiti, where a transparent-plastic corridor, like an umbilicus stretching from the placenta-like Open, led into the intricately engineered uterus of the Space Colony.

She seemed a little pensive; that, and the fact that the freefall rooms were often used for sexual trysts, made him think: Maybe I’ll get lucky.

No way. You’re too old for her.

In the Colony’s Admin Comm Center, Stoner was sucking Coca-Cola Nine from a paper carton and waiting for his call from Earth to come through. He sat at the console, staring at the empty screens; three of them centered with the words “Transmission Wait.”

Steinfeld came in first, from Israel, his image blinking onto the left-hand screen; then Smoke, from London, in the right-hand. The middle screen stayed blank, as Steinfeld said, “Our backer—” meaning Badoit “—won’t do the videoconference. He’s just too paranoid—or maybe just wiser than me. But he’s with us all right. I’ve got the money to prove it. And I think he’s going to lend us some troops for certain actions…”

With the transmission lags edited out, the rest of the conference went, “Smoke, you getting us both?”

“Right with you.”

“Steinfeld?”

“Yes.”

“Steinfeld, are you confident about the security of this transmission?”

“Unless someone’s got a technological edge we don’t know about. Always a possibility.”

“Let’s just do it,” Stoner said. “I got something I need to talk about. Look—if our Backer’s really there for us, then we don’t need Witcher. Correct?”

Steinfeld hesitated. Some interplanetary interference, maybe a burst of solar radiation in a troublesome wavelength, made his image flicker and fuzz for a moment, as if the TV screen were acting out his uncertainty. Then it stabilized—and he nodded. “We can always use Witcher’s support too, but we can now get by without it and still be effective, I think. It’s gotten worse?”

“Yeah,” Stoner said. “it’s gotten worse. I’m pretty sure Witcher’s making concerted efforts to keep intelligence from us.”

“This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s hiding something from us for, ah, the wrong reasons,” Steinfeld said. “It might be a need-to-know issue. Because of extractors.”

“What extractors? Here on the Colony? I doubt it. Anyway—I’ve had an inkling what some of it’s about. It’s something he definitely should be sharing, you know what I mean?” Stoner paused, sucked thoughtfully at the Coca-Cola. These transmissions were expensive, the systems time shouldn’t be squandered, but he had to think about how he put this. “He approached one of our technicians, offered him a lot of money to work for him in private. Setting up a transmitter controlled from his room. He paid the guy to do EVA work, set up a shortwave antenna to piggyback the signal onto our main beam after the transmission goes out, and receive independently… Well, the guy thought about it and came to Parker to see if it was okay. Russ Parker’s the security chief, and assistant administrator. And Parker brought it to me. I told him go ahead and install it, with some modifications… and Witcher doesn’t know about the modifications.”

“You’ve been spying on him?” Steinfeld said. “That was pretty risky. If he’d found out and we didn’t have the backer…”