John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Jerome returned with a stooped, lanky, hawk-nosed man in a rumpled, ill-fitting real-cloth suit of gray pinstripe. He was in his stocking feet. “This woman wanted to talk to you,” Jerome said.

“Jack Smoke,” the tall man said, crossing to them, shaking Jo Ann’s hand.

The restaurant was crowded and close and smelled strongly of beer and beef. Yellowed prints of nineteenth-century opera posters on the wall almost vanished into the dim, dark-wood ambience. The low rafters were smoke-blackened from a time when smoking was allowed in restaurants. Barrabas, Jo Ann, Dahlia, Jack Smoke, and Jerome banged elbows in a hard wooden booth. Bettina sat grouchily on a chair at the end of the table. Jo Ann told her story, keeping her voice down for much of it so they had to strain to hear her. Finishing just as the food arrived.

“Only ting dey know how to cook in dis fuckin’ country is roast beef,” Bettina said, digging into hers with no further preliminaries.

Barrabas would have liked to have resented the remark, only it was uncomfortably correct.

“There’s curries,” Dahlia said. “And cous-cous.”

Not British, Barrabas thought. Except by default.

“I’ve been taking cooking courses,” Dahlia said. (Barrabas thinking: I was right about her, she’s a course taker.) “North African cuisines. And it’s had an effect on my paintings.” (Barrabas nodding to himself.) She went on, “The spicier the food I cook, the more color I tend to use—it’s a reflection of those energies, you know.” And she went on, filling up the time talking about “her art” and “her music,” as Smoke ruminated on Jo Ann’s dilemma.

Finally, when they were drinking bitters and eating pudding, Smoke said, “Jerome. Bettina.”

They looked at him expectantly.

He went on slowly, staring into his half-eaten pudding. Talking low, though the place was crammed with noise, “Can you check the Plateau, see if anyone we can trust has access to an extractor in London?”

Jerome-X and Bettina nodded, like a person with two heads.

And as one, their eyes glazed.

Barrabas felt a chill, looking at them. Like they were in a trance. Some kind of chip augmentation, maybe.

“Mickin,” Bettina said.

“Cover,” Jerome said.

“Hub?” said Jo Ann.

Smoke explained. “They’re talking in a sort of aug-chip shorthand. She said that there was a microwave oven in use creating some interference; Jerome said he’d give her some transmission cover so she could get through.”

“Oh.”

“You wouldn’t mind our using an extractor, Jo Ann?” Smoke asked. Politely but without any real concern for her dislikes.

“An extractor?” Jo Ann asked nervously. “Can you get the stuff out with… well, I guess you can.”

Smoke nodded. “And we can record it. Find out what it is. Way you describe it, it sounds as if it would be of interest to us.”

To us. It was then that Barrabas was sure. About who he’d fallen in with.

He was with the New Resistance.

He was hiding out with his own enemies.

They thanked Dahlia and sent her home. The rest of them cabbed directly from the restaurant to the London Institute of Neurobiology, where a sympathizer had access to an extractor. Getting into the cab, Barrabas was uncomfortably aware that the big black woman was standing very close to him; was, in fact, watching him. As was Jerome. They began keeping an eye on him directly Jo Ann told them about his involvement with the SA. He began to wonder if he would be separated from Jo Ann at some point, taken somewhere for interrogation. Afterward, his body dumped in the Thames…

They weren’t going to just let him go, that was certain. He toyed with the idea of disappearing on his own. He was afraid to return to the SA, but he might hide out with relatives upcountry—or somewhere, anyway, on his own.

He couldn’t bring himself to break away completely from Jo Ann, though. When he looked at her, a strange gestalt organized her face into someplace exquisitely restful.

Suppose he suppressed those feelings. Suppose he asked them to let him out of the cab, right here…

They’d never let him go. They didn’t dare trust him. He could hardly blame them for that, really. There’d be an argument at least, quite possibly a fight.

No. He’d have to take his chances with them, at least for now.

By the time he’d decided, it was fair dark out and they’d arrived at the hospital.

They drove around the back. A nearly midget-size Paki doctor in a blue tunic was waiting for them, his arms clasped anxiously over his chest. He nodded briskly to Smoke, frowned at the others, but said nothing. The doctor led them into the clinical brightness and medicinal tang of the corridor, their footsteps echoing off the white tile walls. He took them hastily into a lab, through the lab to a little room filled with equipment Barrabas didn’t recognize. In the midst of all the cryptic gear was a padded examination table. “Lie down, please,” the doctor said.

Barrabas realized, with a chill, that the doctor wasn’t talking to Jo Ann. He was talking to him. To Patrick Barrabas.

“I’ll go first,” Jo Ann said, seeing the look on his face.

“First?” Barrabas said.

“Lord, motherfucker can talk! I thought he was deef!” Bettina said.

“Keep your voices down, please,” the little doctor said, almost squeaking it, looking through a window in the door. “We’re not supposed to be in here, you know.”

Smoke nodded and said softly to Barrabas, “We have to debrief you, find out how much we can trust you, how you stand on things, what you might know that can help us.”

“For all I know, you might erase part of me,” Barrabas said. “To protect yourselves. Or brainwash me.”

Smoke shook his head. “Not going to erase anything from your head. Or plant anything. Just going to read it. We won’t force you. But…”

But. Barrabas nodded. It wasn’t a threat exactly. That wasn’t the tone the man was using. More a mixture of regret and warning—that they might have to kill him.

Barrabas took a deep breath and said, “You are forcing me, in a way. But sod it.” He turned to Jo Ann. “I’m going to do this for you.” Maybe it was melodramatic; he didn’t care.

He felt trapped. But, strangely, at the same time he felt set free.

He lay down on the table, and she held his hand.

Dawn was breaking steel blue and aluminum gray across the Dover Straits. It was a windy morning, and the sea lashed against the pilings of the dock, making the big hover ferry rock at its moorings. Barrabas and Jo Ann and Smoke and Jerome stood on the dock at the back of the crowd, waiting for the all-clear to go aboard the hover ferry. Bettina was conspicuously absent.

To their right, drivers with permits to take cars to France were queued up, mostly in the cheap Brazilian methanol compacts.

Barrabas huddled into his coat and moved a little closer to Jo Ann. The sky was dull with clouds, and whitecaps tipped the jade peaks of the sea. “Fuckin’ cold,” Jerome-X muttered.

“That’s England for you,” Jo Ann said. “Supposed to be summer.”

“It’ll warm up,” Barrabas said. “It’s early days.” He was looking around, trying to spot SA. “Wish we’d done a plane flight, though.”

Smoke said, in just over a whisper, “The SA’ll be on the airport for sure. They might not’ve come this far looking for us.”

Barrabas said, “I don’t know. I’m surprised they’re not here. They want Jo Ann, and they mean to find her. I know ’em.”

“Maybe they’ll just have the cops arrest us,” Jerome said. Looking over his shoulder; searching the street behind them for someone.