John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“They’ve got a relationship with the police—but they don’t want them involved in this, I’m sure,” Barrabas said.

Jerome looked small and sorrowful, almost lost in the oversize gray trenchcoat he’d borrowed from Dahlia.

Smoke glanced at him. “You sure about this, Jerome? Going with us?”

“Yeah.” But Jerome looked over his shoulder again.

“You think she’s going to come and talk you out of it?” Smoke said.

Jerome-X shot him a hard look. “Fuck you.”

“Jerome—we’ve got Bones in Paris now. He’s our connection to the Plateau there.”

“I don’t want to be a chip chippie. I want to fight.”

“Your career is beginning to move in the States. If you were a celebrity, you could help us there.”

“I don’t fucking want a career. I want to fight. ” Pouting, he huddled deeper into his coat.

Smoke said gently, “Jerome…”

“ What? ”

“There’s more than one way to fight.”

“Look—I saw something once. When I was linked. When we got out of jail. Saw myself. Like—a kinda personality animation thingie. It was sick, man. Need attention all the time. No belief in myself. Trying to be a performer because I want to get into the media. Like, I’m not a valid person unless I’m making records and on TV and stuff. That’s bullshit, Smoke.”

“This is what you were up all night arguing with Bettina over?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s got good instincts, Jerome.”

“You trying to tell me to stick to what I know how to do? I can learn. I don’t have to spend my life trying to be a fucking spectacle. It’s childish. I got to get away from that.”

“Yes. Rickenharp felt something like that. But it didn’t change him. Everybody’s got drives to be one way or another. You have a drive to be a spectacle—so what? Maybe there’s a reason. You saw only the subjective gestalt. There might be some other reason you’re a performer—if it’s neurosis, well, maybe there’s a higher reason for the neurosis. You only see a small thread on the tapestry.”

“It’s too fucking early in the morning to be mystical, Smoke.”

“She’s back there, Jerome, about a block down.”

Jerome looked at Smoke, startled. “Bettina?”

“Yeah. Sitting in a rental car. I saw her. She doesn’t want to come after you. She doesn’t want to humiliate you that way.”

“Be the first time.”

“You should know her better than that. And yourself. You don’t have to prove anything. I know you’re ready to die for us. I just think you could be more useful to us going on with the other thing. Fight for us as an artist. Public relations, consciousness raising. Be yourself, Jerome. I know that hurts. It hurt me once.”

Jerome stared at him, looking as if he was about to erupt with a fuck you. Finally, he grinned. And said, “Hey, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” He slapped Smoke on the shoulder, turned to the others. “Okay. I’m outta here. Good luck, you guys. Keep your head down.”

And then he turned back to Smoke. “What kind of rental car?”

“One of those big Arabian saloon cars that uses lots of cartel oil in its gearbox. I think it was yellow or—”

“Never mind—I’ve got her on chip now.”

He hurried away. Back to Bettina.

Back to his huge black mama, Barrabas thought.

Well, why the hell not.

Barrabas looked speculatively at Smoke. “You going to tell us what the extractor came up with? From Jo Ann, I mean? What was all that stuff they were buggerin’ with in her head?”

Smoke said with flat authority, “No. I’ve got to confirm something first. Bones is in Paris, I’ll talk to him first. He’s got a lot of stuff about genetically engineered organisms stored up. When I know what I’m talking about, I’ll talk about it.”

He looked like something was eating at him, Barrabas decided. Like he’s guessed what this Bones’ll confirm for him. And it scares him.

Quietly scared.

Barrabas knew what it was like to be quietly scared.

“I wish I’d had time to arrange a private boat,” Smoke said, peering southeast, toward the coast of France. Just across the channel, but not quite visible from here. “Anyway, Dahlia said she’d have some people here to cover for us.”

Barrabas snorted. “Dahlia. Bit full of herself, that one.”

Jo Ann shot him a look. “Are you going saying something racist? Because if you are—”

“No, no, no. But—”

“I know what he means,” Smoke said, coming to his rescue. “She’s always talking about herself, her little projects. She can seem shallow.”

Jo Ann shrugged. “She had the crummy luck to be born wealthy. Her parents have a diamond wholesaling outfit. And she’s an only child. Got everything she wanted, almost instantly. She’s never been quite sure of who she was, because she had the freedom to be anyone she wanted. But she’s always there for you. She’s almost the only real friend I had in London.”

Smoke nodded. “She’s always there for us, too. She knows what she’s risking, helping us. She’ll grow up. And in the meantime, she has so many connections—she may surprise you, Patrick.”

Barrabas shrugged. “I been surprised already.” The Hover ferry’s deck hands dropped the gate chain and the crowd began moving onto the vessel, sifting through the bottleneck a few at a time like grains of sand in an hourglass.

And then Barrabas saw the SA chief of London Security, and half a dozen others, all of them in plainclothes, but with hands on guns in their coats. They were getting out of the back of an unmarked green van.

“I see them,” Smoke said. He looked at the ferry. Its gate was still about thirty feet away and there was a heavy crowd in front of them.

The plainclothes thugs started across the street toward them. Smoke reached into his pocket. Jo Ann dug her fingers into Barrabas’s arm.

And then a score of howling teen thrashers on skateboards erupted from an alleyway.

And they made straight for the startled SA heavies.

The thrashers’d look ridiculous if they didn’t look so frightful, Barrabas thought—and so kinetically in control. Their scalp-ups were molded into the sort of fins you saw on mid-twentieth-century cars. And they all wore those absurd mirrored goggles. Despite the chill, they wore nothing but skin-tight neoprene kneepants, no shoes. Every one of them was etched with lean muscletone, and gang-color tattoos. Chrome insignias from cars, from Fuel-Cell BMWs, Jaguars, Mercedes, Mitsubishi 999s, swinging, glinting, on glass chains around their necks. They skated on big, narrow translucent-plastic skateboards edged in super-glued broken bottle glass, patchy with decals; skating half crouched, heads forward, chromed teeth flashing.

Strapped to their calves, hook-shaped blades, razor sharp; spikes on knees and elbows.

And the same expression, like a kind of uniform, on every face: as wide and as evil a grin as human facial muscles are capable of.

Probably a result of their drug combination, their stoke-up rush: 2C-B mixed with methedrine and vitamins, he’d heard. Which was why they were up at dawn, raging and indifferent to the cold.

Some variant of thrash/acid-house, mixed special for the thrashers, whipped the air from a soundbox strapped to the leader’s back as he led the gang into the thick of the SA thugs. The leader—the thrasher cap’n—pumped his legs on the skateboard, its wheels gimmicked to translate the pumping motion into kinetic energy so he didn’t have to kick off from the street. The boys yelled cryptic war cries in the variation of Technicki that English street punks used, “Guhfee muh bleh outcher—”

“Arsebug uh shuva bya fook!”