John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Maybe. I couldn’t resist the chance to find out what’s going on with him.”

“You’re still CIA at heart, Stoner,” Smoke said.

Stoner shot a glare at Smoke’s camera. The remark hadn’t been a compliment.

“It’s done,” Stoner said, “and what I got is some back-and-forth with his company vice president about some investigation his outfit’s been doing for him. The SA’s been hiring people with expertise in gen-engineering viruses. Witcher sent a transmission asking them to get him the specs…”

“To me, sounds like he’s doing research for our protection,” Steinfeld said. “We have worried about the fascists developing biowar materiel.”

“But why all this secretiveness about the transmission? His transmission is no more secure than ours—except from me and Parker.”

Steinfeld shrugged. “He’s a paranoid, maybe deciding to look into it on his own, doesn’t want to trust anyone else until he has to.”

“It doesn’t feel like that to me. It doesn’t jibe with my experience,” Stoner said. “And that is the CIA man in me.”

Steinfeld said, “Okay, keep monitoring him. Investigate any way you want. The risks…”

“Maybe,” Smoke said, “it warrants extractor interrogation—if it comes to that, we could talk about it.”

“Are you serious, Smoke?” Steinfeld asked. “Witcher?”

“I’ve often felt he had some kind of… hidden agenda,” Smoke said.

“He might be playing both ends against the middle,” Stoner said. “NR against SA for some reason. Maybe just to benefit his company.”

“No,” Steinfeld said. “If you think that, you don’t know him. He’s a strange sort of idealist. If he’s playing us against them, he has some other reason.”

“So I can go ahead and look into it.”

“Yes.” There was regret in Steinfeld’s tone, audible over hundreds of thousands of miles of void. “Look into it.”

Women’s liberation, Russ Parker thought, was a regional thing on Earth. It was widespread in much of the US and Europe, still a rarity in much of the Middle East and parts of India though the worst oppression of women had eased there. Lately it was doing surprisingly well in Africa, largely due to the efforts of the black woman who was the president of South Africa and the chairwoman of the African National Congress.

But it hadn’t made a lot of headway in Texas. Not where Parker was raised.

It was one of those things that Parker believed in—but somehow found hard to live up to. So Claire’s aggressiveness caught him off guard. Confused him.

That’s not to say he didn’t like it when she grabbed him in midair, kissed him hard on the mouth, and wrapped her legs around his hips.

There had, yes, been preliminaries. They’d talked a great deal on the way here. He’d talked about his ex-girlfriend back on Earth, and she’d talked about Torrence. Talking about past lovers was a way of laying the romantic groundwork without being too blunt about it, he supposed. And for her, maybe it was a kind of confessional—she felt guilty about Torrence. About thinking she needed a love life away from him. Talking about it, admitting the guilt, was some kind of expiation in advance, he supposed.

Talk had stopped ten minutes into their freefall time. The sound system was playing the Japanese composer Tanaka, sweeping expanses of synthesizer sound and sampled choirs superimposing the cathedralesque on the ethereal; beating with the soft, insistent pulse of longing, of subdued libido. He watched her turn in the air like an Eastern European gymnast in a slow-motion instant replay, no wasted motion, interpreting the music but without self-consciousness, without extravagance. He watched the ballet ripple of her breasts; the roundness of her movements in the air…

Then she’d grabbed him, kissed him, clasped him with her legs. They were spinning in a slow cartwheel through the big, roughly circular room, its lights dialed low. The padded walls wheeling by. Parker’s stomach rebelled—he had less tolerance for anything that threatened his balance, the older he got—but his sex engorged, and strained at his trousers. He felt her undo his zipper, was briefly embarrassed when he felt the cold air at his crotch. She wriggled out of her clothes like some fantastic flying animal molting in the air. He undressed more clumsily, wishing the lights were dimmer to better hide his paunch. He reached out and stopped her spinning when they got near a wall; Claire seemed to accept that he needed anchored sex. He’d never done it in freefall; had heard it took training. But holding on to a wall strap, finding the center of gravity between them, in their interlocked genitals, they had the advantage of freefall sex without the disadvantages. It was rather like something he’d done on Earth once: making love in a swimming pool, holding on to the concrete edge. But there was no water to interfere with them here. Nothing interfered with them. The near-weightlessness seemed to cohere their flesh more completely, let their blood surge more freely. He penetrated her gravitational field, a gravity well it was called, and imagined they were like a two-planet system in space, like the Earth and the moon…

After he came, the semen escaped from her vagina, made opalescent pearls around them in the air, quivering with potential life.

Okay, he thought, holding her, the two of them floating slowly, reclining in one another’s arms, drifting through afterglow…

She took his head between her hands and gave him a long, slow kiss.

Okay, she likes older men too…

“They know I’m here,” Torrence said.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Roseland. “It’s a coincidence.”

Torrence sat with Bibisch and Roseland at a café table on Place Clichy. The place was crowded. They sat with their backs to the glass of the café windows, at one of the innermost tables, feeling the sunlight glancing off the window bring sweat out on the backs of their necks. Underneath the statuary in the midst of the square, across from the bombed-out shell of the old adult video store, the Unity Party soldiers were lining up the prisoners. More prisoners blinked in the sunlight as they were brought out of the backs of trucks. How many were they going to execute?

“They must know I’m here,” Torrence said again.

“How could they know?” Bibisch said. “ Nous arrivons —” She broke off when Roseland shook his head at her. She sipped her iced coffee with no sign of enjoyment.

They’d come to the café because she had heard that this one had real coffee. Now that the war was over, shipments of prime consumer goods were coming into Paris again, but the stuff was taking forever, it seemed, to reach the public. Maybe some of the corrupt U.P. bureaucrats had to take theirs off the top first, to make a last profit on the black market.

Forty, Torrence thought, as the soldiers slammed the rear doors of the transport truck. They’re going to kill forty people. They know I’m here.

“They are the U.P’s Soldats Superieurs,” Bibisch whispered.

Torrence nodded dumbly. The government’s new SA-trained elite troops of Racially Pure Frenchmen. Superior Soldiers. The Unity Party’s SS. They wore armored kevlar uniforms of silver and flat black, the U.P.’s symbol sewn onto the shoulders: the Arc de Triomphe against a French flag.

“We will go now, Dan,” Bibisch said. “Come on.”

He shook his head. He couldn’t move. A spiritual inertia held him rooted to his chair. A weight in his gut he couldn’t possibly lift. He weighed about a ton and a half. About the weight of forty underfed people.

Some of the prisoners were dark-skinned, a few of them were Hassidim, several of them white French “subversives”; they milled in a small oblate crowd, blurred together, individuality lost in the commonality of their confusion at this abrupt consummation of destiny. The guards stood around them in a human chain, facing inward. A man Torrence recognized as Giessen, The Thirst, studied the crowd around the square. Don’t move. Don’t run. Don’t scream. He’ll notice you.