John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Torrence leaned back and closed his eyes. And tried to believe it.

Steinfeld went on. “Listen—she asked for something just before she went into surgery. It’s kind of… perhaps a little grotesque. But it seemed important to her. She said if she didn’t make it…”

Torrence opened his eyes, saw Steinfeld looking confused and embarrassed. “Well?”

“She wants you to have one of her ears.”

“What?”

“With her love.”

“Her ear?”

“Something about Van Gogh. And you missing an ear. She said you looked like an alley cat after a bad fight all the time, with that ear shot off. What I mean is—she wanted to have one of her ears transplanted onto you, to replace the one you lost. The visible ear. They’ll mold it with surgery to make it symmetrical with your other one, use grafting and tissue-bonding agents to get it to, ah, take once it’s implanted and… You see, it would actually be quite helpful. We’re tired of looking at you. Frankly”—he smiled grimly—“we’re sick of your face.”

“Apparently, I got out of Paris in the nick of time,” Smoke said. “They had some trouble there after I left. Just a day after.”

“You are okay?” Alouette’s image compressed and expanded like an accordion, yawed left and right, and then stabilized. Mexico had notoriously bad fone transmission.

“Yes, I’m all right. No one even shot at me. But some of the others…” He broke off, wondering how much to tell her. She was still just a kid. She’d stayed in the hospital with him after he’d been wounded in D.C.; she knew about the danger to him, and to the resistance. But maybe it was best he didn’t tell her about the massacre at the train. “It’s worked out all right,” he finished lamely.

Smoke was in the relatively modest suite Badoit kept at the New York Fuji-Hilton, leaning back in an easy chair, looking out through the glass wall at the sunset breaking though the Manhattan skyline. In this smoggy sunset light, the city looked like a cluster of red-hot smokestacks. He was tired, jet-lagged, but was fighting sleep. He had too much to do. He hadn’t even unpacked yet. He tapped a console to order espresso from a serving table beside the chair. A plastic cup emerged from a chute; a jet shpritzed hot black espresso.

“Are you okay, Alouette?”

“Yes. I miss you. Someone here, he wants to see you.” She clucked her tongue, chirped in Merinese at someone off-camera. The crow hopped onto her arm, tilting its head with one of those birdlike movements that was like bad cartoon animation: not enough frames per second.

“Well, hello, Richard,” Smoke said.

The crow shook itself and made a raucous noise in its throat. Smoke grinned. He remembered when the bird had come to him in Amsterdam on that ruined balcony. They’d both survived a great deal since then. The crow was a link to a Jack Smoke who seemed like a dream now—a homeless, half-mad babbler to birds.

“Are you going to come and see me?” Alouette said. Sounding as if she might cry.

Smoke said, “Soon! Um—as soon as I can. I’m about to start a media blitz, try and get Grid-Entry for…” He hesitated, unsure as to how secure this line was. Especially since this was Badoit’s suite. Badoit had his share of enemies. He didn’t want to even say Hand’s name. “A campaign to explain to people what’s really going on over there.”

She nodded. “You have a guard?”

“Yes. A bodyguard.” He sipped espresso. Not bad for out of a cred-vend machine. “He’s doing push-ups in the next room.”

It was a lie. He should have a bodyguard, and didn’t. Bodyguards made him feel conspicuous, and that feeling was scarier to him than the risk of going without a bodyguard. And he didn’t think the enemy knew he was here.

“Okay. You come and see me soon?”

“Yes. Are you studying hard?”

“I’m learning so much. You want me to show you some chip readouts? Ask me a math question. I can tell you what day of the week it’ll be, any day of any Year—like April twelfth, the year 3503.”

“Never mind.” Thinking that the chips made people into a variation of autistic savants. “I believe you. I heard you did some trans-Atlantic work with our Jerome-X.”

“They didn’t have anybody in London that processed genetic cores as good as me.”

“Do you know what it was you were processing?”

“No. Something about germs.”

“Uh-huh.” Good. He didn’t want her to know what that was about if she didn’t have to. She had enough to be afraid of. He sipped more espresso. The sun went down, the sunset drawing in on itself like a hermit crab into a shell; the adumbration of night made itself known over the city: lights became more brilliant, shone out of the city’s deeper places like the reflective pupils of Rousseau jungle animals. More and more lights shone, more clearly electric now; each one marking a person, or people.

He wondered how close the SA was to using the racially selective virus. He wondered how many of those lights would be switched off when they used it.

It might be a dark city soon.

“On satellite news they said you had an acid rainstorm there,” she said. Looking more excited than worried.

“Yes. It delayed the plane. A particularly acidic storm. That sort can be deadly for the homeless over a period of hours, I hear. The rains aren’t so bad this year, though, as the last five years. The stuff’s finally beginning to work its way out of the biosphere, I suppose. Global warming complicates things so it’s hard to say for sure…”

“They waited too long to make the laws.”

“Yes. For those kinds of laws, they always do. Have you got someone to play with there?”

“Julio plays with me. He showed me how to catch a scorpion in the desert.”

“What! Isn’t anybody watching the kids in that facility? Is Bettina there?”

“She’s not back from London yet. Tomorrow.”

“Tell her to call me. And don’t go playing with scorpions in the desert, Alouette.”

In any sense, he thought, don’t play with scorpions in the desert.

Roseland wanted to hit Pasolini. He wanted to scream at her. She was so fucking sure of herself. And God, she loved being in charge.

They were in what had been a security monitoring room for the old Metro subway system. The portable, caged electric lights were hanging on the hook in the doorframe by their orange industrial extension cords, parasitically drawing on cables NR techs had exposed in the cracked concrete ceiling of the old station. Roseland and Pasolini and two other NR were sitting cross-legged on the floor across from the little computer screen they’d patched into the city’s one working channel. Watching the Unity Party news on “unconfirmed reports of the capture of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.” The Fascists, gloating about their omniscience. No one escaped the long arm of the Special Police. And so forth.

Fuck you, Roseland thought. I got away. Torrence will too.

“Pasolini—Torrence is important to us. He’s like a linchpin. Ask Lespere if you don’t believe me. I don’t think you’re considering this in an unbiased way. We’ve got to get him out.”

“And lose how many people? It’s foolish. He got himself caught—he walked into it like an imbecile.”

“He was trying to liberate some prisoners—”

“He should never have come back to Paris so soon. It was stupid! He had a bandage on his head in that picture. I think he must have had some brain damage. Stupid. No, I will not risk everything to try to get a single man out of SA prison. Do you know how many political prisoners they have? They are all important to me. Just as important as Torrence. They have children in prison—”