John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“How’d you get away with copying the file?” Roseland asked.

“Barrabas is a former Second Alliance operative,” Smoke said blandly—electrifying the room. “He turned. He’s with us now. He’d copied the file when he started having trouble with Cooper—thought he might use it to blackmail the bastards.”

Barrabas was staring fixedly at his knees, probably aware that everyone else was staring fixedly at him. Anger twitched at the corners of his jaws.

“We put him under extractor, decided we could trust him. He’s pretty disillusioned.”

Barrabas snorted. “Disillusioned.” His voice breaking. “Bugger it. Disillusioned. Shit. They’re fucking maniacs. ”

Either the guy was a great actor or he meant it, Roseland decided. Barrabas knew the whole story now. Made him realize things—that people are people and death is forever. And that deep suffering seems like forever.

Roseland said, “Hey, Barrabas. Welcome aboard, man.”

Barrabas reached out, slowly… and shook the Jew’s hand.

Torrence had come up to the storeroom to be alone. He sat by the window in the musty darkness, waiting for the moon to come out. Just to have something to wait for. He thought about viruses. Viruses to sicken computers; viruses to annihilate a people.

He thought about Giessen. About Giessen winning. Giessen and Watson and Crandall. If he turned himself in to them, had they won? Hell, no. They’d just snagged one self-important guerrilla. A self-appointed Che without even a people, in particular, to fight for. And then the reprisals would stop for a while.

He thought about Randy Maynard, a friend of his in high school. Pretty close friend, for a while, till he found out Randy was gay. And then he’d distanced himself from Randy, without really cutting him completely off. Well. Maybe he had cut him off.

Still, it’d been a kick in the head when he’d heard that Randy had AIDS-three. Every damn time they had a vaccine for the HIV virus, some other mutation of it cropped up, and the vaccine didn’t work on the new one. AIDS-three killed pretty fast. Anywhere between three weeks to six months of coming into contact with it. It took Randy two and a half months to develop significant symptoms. They kept him going for a while with antiviral treatments.

And Torrence was thinking about something Randy had said when he’d gone to visit him at the hospital. “I open my eyes in the morning, and for a minute or two I’m just here, waking up in a bed, stretching, yawning, looking around. Thinking about, like, what do I have to do today. It’s always a minute or two before I think of it… you know… remember that I’m dying…”

That’s how Torrence felt, after a fashion. He could get involved in New Resistance planning, in resistance work. And in Bibisch. He could forget his personal doom for a minute or two. But the shadow was never far from him.

He still heard the screams at Place Clichy. In reprisal for the crimes of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.

He blinked away tears, and laughed bitterly, thinking: Hard-Eyes. What a fucking joke.

Some of them died quickly…

For the crimes of—

Some of them took a while.

The terrorist—

Fountains of blood…

Hard-Eyes.

“Dan?” The creak of the boards under her feet. “Danny?”

“Hey, fuck off right now, okay, Bibisch?”

“I don’t like you to talk to me that way.” She knelt beside him. “Don’t cry. It’s not your fault—”

“Just don’t say that, okay?” Snarling it.

“You are making me ashamed with this sheet.”

“This what?”

“Sheet. Merde. ”

“Oh: shit.” He laughed stupidly. “I don’t care if you’re ashamed. Leave me fucking alone.”

“You are a…” She searched for the American term. “Wimp. Pussy.”

“What kind of clumsy bullshit psychology is that? You think I’m insecure about myself? Call me what you want.”

She changed tactics. “You kill those people. They die because of you.”

“What?”

She slapped him. Grabbed his hair and jerked his head back.

“Maybe this time I spank you, ‘Hard-Eyes.’”

He pulled loose. “What kind of stupid game—”

She lunged at him, knocked him on his back, straddled him. “Kiss this, you—”

He was a switchblade, triggered. She was flung against the wall.

He saw a flashing red light. (Hearing the screams at Place Clichy.) He struck out—

Then he saw blood—the blood on his hands. He looked at her. She was motionless, leaning against the wall, eyes closed.

“Bibisch?”

She opened her eyes and smiled sadly. “ Ça va. I’m okay.” Her lip had split, bled on his hands.

“Oh, Jesus, Bibisch, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. How you feel?”

“Me?” He felt relieved. He should be ashamed of feeling relieved, he thought. Self-disgust oozed like an oil slick over him. “Goddammit. Why’d you—God, I’m sorry. There’s no excuse. It’s wrong, hitting you. In a serious way like that. Your lip. I’m sorry—”

“You hurt me.”

“I’m sorry—” His shoulders shaking with it.

“It is wrong to hurt me. To hit women like that.”

“Yes.” Shaking with the flood of released guilt. “True.”

Torrence thinking: If Claire knew what he’d done just now. Hurt a woman. Not a little roughness in a sexual game. But he’d really hurt her, beaten her, taken out his rage on her.

Guilt seared through him like a lethal poison. Burning through him.

Purging him.

He sat up and stared at her. He was empty and tired. But suddenly, he felt some hope. “I…”

“You feel better.”

“Yeah. You did it on purpose?”

“ Oui. Bien sûr. ”

“You liked it, then?”

“Ah, no. Not at all. It was far too much. It scared me. Hurt me. No, it was not… No, I didn’t like it. But—” Her voice became husky and she looked at the window. “But— Je t’aime. ”

And that’s when the moon came out.

“We think they’re back in Paris,” Rolff told Watson. “And there’s something worse. We interrogated a man who says the NR have an important TV reporter. It is a global company with a lot of syndication in the United States. Norman Hand. They’re going to try to get him out of the country—apparently he has some very damaging video. We think they’re going to take Barrabas and this woman along…” Rolff shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s this idiot Cooper’s fault.”

“Is that whose fault it is?” Giessen asked, almost innocently.

Watson ground his teeth so hard he could feel them chip. He sensed Giessen smirking at the other end of the conference table—Giessen not even having to point out that Watson didn’t have the city in hand. “Did you get a location?”

“No. We still don’t know where they are…”

“We can’t let this Hand get out. Or the others. It’s just unthinkable. I suppose Cooper is useless now?”

Rolff sighed. “He’s functioning. We’ve got control of his balancer. He babbled for an hour after he had his little breakdown… I’d like to kill him personally.”

“We need him still,” Watson said, adding absentmindedly, “but when we don’t—be my guest.” There was a moment of restless silence. Then Watson slammed a fist onto the table. “Bloody hell! Seal off the city!”

Rolff winced. “Just as things were getting back to normal here. The Party won’t like it.”

“The Party will do as it’s told. Seal off the city. ”

Torrence knew something was wrong when the train stopped suddenly and noisily between Paris and Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The usually quiet train sinking down off its electromagnetic cushion, banging down onto the track with a clang and a spine-shivering scree-ee-ee …