John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Torrence is valuable to the Resistance.”

“Not that much.”

“You’re prejudiced against him. You were rivals. Think past your own biases, Pasolini.”

“I said no. Steinfeld made the chain of command quite clear. If you don’t like it—” She waved her stubby Russian cigarette imperiously. “—find another cause.”

“This is more my cause than yours—”

“Oh, your precious Jewish heritage. The martyrs of the world.”

“Don’t give me any of your anti-Semitic shit, Pasolini, or I swear to God I’ll put a…” He broke off, staring at the TV. “Oh, shit.”

They saw Dan Torrence on TV. He was marched out across a prison compound. A doll-size Torrence on a little, snowy TV screen in the corner of a concrete floor—an image of someone they knew intimately, seeming like a stranger, like some video-abstracted figure from TV news. Treated like just another faceless terrorist caught out in the floodlights.

And marched into the featureless brown building. The camera, hand-held and wobbling, following them into the gas chamber. Something more ignominious about gassing an enemy of the state—less heroic than putting him in front of a firing squad. The Second Alliance had chosen the means of execution thoughtfully.

“And what have they learned from him, with their extractors?” Pasolini was saying.

The commentator speaking in a low, serious voice, and in French, but Roseland knew the sort of thing being said. The criminal shows no emotion as he is taken to his death; he has had every opportunity to express remorse, and has shunned those opportunities… There is, perhaps, even a sneer on his face as he is led into the chamber… But now we see the truth behind the mask as his cowardice shows, and he begins to panic…

Roseland thinking: God. Dan looked awful. Sunken, sick. What have they done to him? Broken him with torture. Must have been dead for days, psychologically.

Roseland stood up, walked to the screen, and kicked it in.

Whop, the screen imploding. Glass tinkling to the floor. Sparks and a burning smell.

“Idiota!” Pasolini shouted.

Roseland turned and started for the door—then he stopped, staring at the monitors on the old Metro security console. The resistance techs had rigged the cameras to work again—and they showed armed men coming down the corridor, too far from the camera to see clearly.

“Intruders,” Roseland said, grabbing his Royal Army surplus Enfield. He ran out onto the disused Metro platform, scuffing through the plaster dust that had fallen during the shellings, shouting at the guerrillas playing cards near the stairs. “Company coming!”

Pasolini was beside him, shouting orders. Roseland was rounding a corner, running up the ramp the intruders were coming down. Somewhere in the back of his head, Roseland as thinking, Do it now. Take some of these assholes out, push ’em. Not quite thinking, consciously, the rest of it:

Make them kill you.

Because seeing Torrence marched into the gas chamber had been one death too many. It was time to join his friends…

He was halfway up the ramp when the intruders rounded a corner. He raised his rifle.

And recognized Steinfeld. “Shit!” He stopped, staring. Steinfeld and four other guerrillas, including a Japanese guy. “I almost blew you assholes away! Why didn’t you signal down?”

“We did,” Steinfeld said. “No one acknowledged. Where’s your communications man?”

“Uh—watching the execution on TV, I guess. We were distracted. Torrence…”

“I know.” Steinfeld came closer, the others at his heels. Put a big hand on Roseland’s shoulder. “It was terrible.”

“ Steinfeld, ” the Japanese guy said, sounding exasperated.

Tall for a Japanese, probably a half-breed. Bandage on one ear. Something familiar about his voice.

The guy smiled. A familiar smile.

Roseland stared at him.

Blurting, “You sons of bitches.”

Steinfeld laughed.

“You fuckheads.”

The guerrillas chortled.

“You shit-eating putzim !”

Daniel Torrence embraced him.

Roseland didn’t try to stop the tears. He laughed as they rolled down his cheeks. “You motherfucking assholes!”

He stood back, and looked at Torrence. “Who are you supposed to be?”

Torrence grinned. “John Ibishi. Son of a Japanese businessman and an American masseuse. Microcomputer consultant to several French companies.”

Steinfeld put in, “The kind of foreigner the French Fascists leave alone—for the moment—because they need them for the economy.”

Roseland admired the surgical craftsmanship displayed in Torrence’s new face; the epicanthic folds on Torrence’s eyes, the higher cheekbones, the faint tint to the skin. “Badoit hired the best.”

“You guessed it.”

Roseland looked at the other guerrillas. Started to ask where Bibisch was, and didn’t. He could see it in the sag of Torrence’s shoulders, hear it in the strain that went in his banter. Bibisch was dead.

But Torrence was alive. And free from the reprisals.

“Who the hell did they execute?”

“One of their own people,” Torrence said. “A processing-center guard we captured. About my size, close to my looks. We wiped his brain with an extractor, planted a bunch of stuff that seemed to be garbled-up Torrence memories in him. Nothing useful to them. Just tantalizing stuff. Levassier gave him a nasty bash on the head—making it look like he was garbled from brain damage. From a gunshot wound. And whacked off an ear. Planted him where he’d be captured…” He shrugged. “Was an American, too. Some real asshole. Never knew what hit him.”

“Must’ve been confused as all hell.” Roseland tilted his head to one side, rubbed his chin, and looked Torrence over thoughtfully. “You know something, Dan—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Now that I look you over—”

“I’m warning you.”

“You really—look—”

“Don’t say it!”

“—much better as a Japanese.”

“I told you not to say it.”

“If only they’d made you Jewish.”

Watson sat in one of the rows of canvas chairs on the afterdeck of the big patrol boat, between Giessen and Rolff. Just behind the boy Jebediah.

You deal with one problem, Watson thought, and five more crop up to take its place. The Hydra of chaos. The sword of order, the Second Alliance’s new order, must keep chopping at the proliferating heads of the Hydra of chaos—cutting short the vector of disorder they called subversion. That was just part of the job—a perpetual tidying-up.

Giessen wasn’t making it any easier.

It was time to see if Giessen could be transferred out. “You’re needed in America, Giessen,” Watson said. “That’s where Hand is hiding out, where this Barrabas traitor is, where the gadfly Jack Smoke is—if you’ll excuse the pun, it’s where he’s blowing smoke up the asses of the American public. We need you there.”

Giessen shook his head. “America is unfriendly to our people these days.”

They were in the back of one of the new UPSS patrol boats, moving upstream on the Seine. It was a warm evening. There were silver and black clouds wreathing the horned moon, and streetlights glowing softly from the bridges; the natural and man-made light melting together in the silk fan of the boat’s wake. The living smell of the river melded with the boat’s methanol vapors.

Watson could have enjoyed it, as a tourist, under different circumstances. But he had to deal with Giessen and the Unity Party officials, and the blasted kid Jebediah.

“A little wine, Colonel Watson?” Bisse, the party’s general vice secretary, was acting the steward. He was a stooped, vulpine man with bad teeth and a cheap government-issue suit—which he wore piously to show his dedication to the U.P. austerity program.