John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

What was it Praeger had said?

…provided the right stimuli the technickis would drop their inane, self-indulgent rebellion of their own initiative. Willingly.

Claire took a deep breath and turned to Praeger. “You feel they can be swayed with a broader media campaign. It won’t work. Not with the blockade building up the pressure, making everyone a little more afraid every day…”

Praeger said, “Media campaign?” He seemed abstracted. He smiled faintly. “Not precisely. Nothing so transparent… I think we’ve lost sight of the problem at this meeting. The problem is sabotage! The problem is a life-support risk! This is a life-threatening emergency, Claire! For their sakes as well as—well, for everyone’s sakes, we have to take the reins in our hands. All of the reins.”

Claire looked at the screen. “They’re not so stupid as to damage the life supports. They don’t want to eat vacuum any more than we do.”

“When people get excited,” Praeger said calmly, “they tend to forget common-sense considerations. The thing could get out of control—farther out of control than any one of them would like. An individual technicki is logical—a mob of technickis is not.”

“And you propose to defuse them by taking control of their media? That’ll only infuriate them!”

“You misunderstand me. I mean—we’ll control it indirectly. They won’t know we’re doing it, if we do it right.”

“But that’s…” She was at a loss for words. She looked again to her father. But he was standing up.

“Well, it’s been delightful,” Rimpler said. Smiling vacantly. He walked to the door, without saying anything more; without even looking around. Leaving her alone with them.

Claire grated, “Dad! Dammit—take some responsibility!”

He paused at the door, turned to her the look of a bad little boy caught doing what he shouldn’t.

She looked away. Scornfully: “Oh, forget it. Go on.”

He shrugged, turned, and opened the door. She thought, Maybe he manipulated me. Knew I couldn’t handle that little-kid shit. Knew that’d force me to let him go…

Scanlon was looking thoughtfully after Rimpler. Something icy-cold about the expression on Scanlon’s face frightened Claire.

Rimpler closed the door behind him—effectively closing the door on his leadership in Colony Admin.

Praeger was gazing at the screen. “This man Bonham could be very useful to us,” he said.

Messer-Krellman said, “I believe Claire made a motion a little while ago. Does anyone second it? Should we vote on it?” He liked the formalities. And he knew how the vote would turn out.

“Don’t bother,” Claire said. “I suggest we table any further action till 0900 tomorrow. We all need to think about this. Just keep in mind: the situation is explosive, with the blockade of the Colony. They know the Colony is blockaded, they know resources will run low. They’re going to be more insistent than ever—you won’t be able to manipulate them.” She got up and followed her Father out the door.

She paused for a moment before going out, and looked over her shoulder.

Van Kips and Praeger were looking at the screen. Praeger said something to Van Kips. She nodded.

Feeling helpless, Claire left the room.

Rickenharp put on his dark glasses, because of the way the Walk tugged at him.

The Walk wound through the interlinked Freezone outfloats for a half-mile, looping up and back, a hairpin canyon of arcades crusted with neon and glowflake, holos and screens. It was involuted, intensified by layering and a blaze of colored light.

Stoned, very stoned: Rickenharp and Carmen walked together through the sticky-warm night, almost in step. Yukio walked behind, Willow ahead, and Rickenharp felt like part of a jungle patrol formation. And he had another feeling: that they were being followed, or watched. Maybe it was suggestion, from seeing Yukio and Willow glance over their shoulders now and then…

Rickenharp felt a ripple of kinetic force under his feet, an arc of wallow moving in languid whiplash through the flexible streetstuff, telling him that the breakers were up today, the baffles around the artificial island feeling the strain.

The arcades ran three levels above the narrow street; each level had its own sidewalk balcony; people stood at the railing to look down at the segmented snake of street traffic. The stack of arcades funneled a rich wash of scents to Rickenharp: the french-fry toastiness of the fast food; the sweet harshness of smashweed smoke, gyno-smoke, tobacco smoke—the cloy of perfumes; the mixed odors of fish-ka-bob stands, urine, rancid beer, popcorn, sea air; and the faint ozone smell of the small, eerily quiet electric cars jockeying on the street. His first time here, Rickenharp had thought the place smelled wrong for a red light cluster. “It’s wimpy,” he’d said. Then he’d realized he was missing the bass-bottom of carbon monoxides. There were no combustion cars on Freezone. Some parts of America still permitted pollutive, resource-greedy gasoline cars, and Rickenharp, being a retro, had preferred those places.

The sounds splashed over Rickenharp in a warm wave of cultural fecundity; pop tunes from thudders and wrist-boxes swelled in volume as they passed, the guys exuding the music insignificant in comparison to the noise they carried, the skanky tripping of protosalsa or the calculatedly redundant pulse of minimono.

Rickenharp and Carmen walked beneath a fiberglass arch—so covered with graffiti its original commemorative meaning was lost—and ambled down the milky walkway under the second-story arcade boardwalk. The multinational crowd thickened as they approached the heart of the Walk. The soft lights glowing upward from beneath the polystyrene walkway gave the crowd a 1940s-horror-movie look; even through the dark glasses the place tugged at Rickenharp with a thousand subliminal come-hithers.

Rickenharp was still riding the blue mesc surf, but the wave was beginning to break; he could feel it crumbling under him. He looked at Carmen. She glanced back at him, and they understood one another. She looked around, then nodded toward the darkened doorway of a defunct movie theater, a trash-cluttered recess twenty feet off the street. They went into the doorway; Yukio and Willow stood with their backs to the door, blocking the view from the street, so that Rickenharp and Carmen could each do a double hit of blue mesc. There was a kind of little-kid pleasure in stepping into seclusion to do drugs, a rush of outlaw in-crowd romance to it. On the second sniff the graffiti on the pad-locked, fiberglass doors seemed to writhe with significance. “I’m running low,” Carmen said, checking her mesc bottle.

“Running low on drugs? Whoever heard of that happening?” Rickenharp said and they both burst in peals of laughter. His mind was racing now, and he felt himself click into the boss blue verbal mode. “You see that graffiti? You’re gonna die young because the ITE took the second half of your life. You know what that is? I didn’t know what ITE was till yesterday, I used to see those things and wonder and then somebody said—”

“Immortality something or other,” she said, licking blue mesc off her sniffer.

“Immortality Treatment Elite. Supposedly some people keeping an immortality treatment to themselves because the government doesn’t want the public to live too long and overpopulate the place. Another bullshit conspiracy theory.”

“You don’t believe in conspiracies?”

“I don’t know—some. Nothing that far-fetched. But—I think people are being manipulated all the time. Even here… this place tugs at you, you know. Like—”

Willow said, “Right, we’ll ’ave our sociology class later children, you gotter? Where’s this place with the bloke can get us off the fooking island?”