John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Mostly they stood around, gossiped on their helmet radios. Now two of them hassled a sidewalk three-card-monte artist—a withered little black guy who couldn’t afford the baksheesh—pushing him back and forth between them, bantering one another through helmet amplifiers, their voices booming over the discothud from the speakers on the download shops:

“WHAT THE FUCK YOU DOING ON MY BEAT SCUMBAG. HEY BILL YOU KNOW WHAT THIS GUY’S DOING ON MY BEAT.”

“FUCK NO I DUNNO WHAT’S HE DOING ON YOUR BEAT.”

“HE’S MAKlNG ME SICK WITH THIS RIP-OFF MONTE BULLSHIT IS WHAT HE’S DOING.”

One of them hit the guy too hard with the waldo-enhanced arm of his riot suit and the monte dealer spun to the ground like a top running out of momentum, out cold.

“LOITERING ON THE ZONE’S WALKS, YOU SEE THAT BILL.”

“I SEE AND IT MAKES ME SICK JIM.”

The bulls dragged the little guy by the ankle to a lozenge-shaped kiosk in the street and pushed him into a man-capsule. They sealed the capsule, scribbled out a report, pasted it onto the capsule’s hard plastic hull. Then they shoved the man-capsule into the kiosk’s chute. The capsule was sucked by mail-tube principle to Freezone Lockup.

“Looks like they’re using some kind of garbage disposal to get rid of people here,” Carmen said when they were past the cops.

Rickenharp looked at her. “You weren’t nervous walking by the cops. So it’s not them we’re avoiding, huh?”

“Nope.”

“You wanna tell me who it is we’re supposed to be avoiding?”

“Uh-uh, I do not.”

“How do you know these out-of-town cops you’re worried about haven’t gone to the locals and recruited some help?”

“Yukio says they won’t, they don’t want anybody to scan what they’re doing here because the Freezone admin don’t like ’em.”

Rickenharp guessed: the who they were avoiding was the Second Alliance. Freezone’s chairman was Jewish. The Second Alliance could meet in Freezone—the idea was, the place was open to anyone for meetings, or recreation; anyone, even people the Freezone boss would like to see gassed—but the SA couldn’t operate here, except covertly.

The fucking SA bulls! Shit!… The blue mesc worked with his paranoia. Adrenaline spurted, making his heart bang. He began to feel claustrophobic in the crowd; began to see patterns in the movement around him, patterns charged with meaning superimposed by his own fear-galvanized mind. Patterns that taunted him with, The SA’s close behind. He felt a stomach-churning combination of horror and elation.

All night he’d worked hard at suppressing thoughts of the band. And of his failure to make the band work. He’d lost the band. And it was almost impossible to make anyone understand why that was, to him, like a man losing his wife and children. And there was the career. All those years of pushing for that band, struggling to program a place for it in the Grid. Shot to hell now, his identity along with it. He knew, somehow, that it would be futile to try to put together another band. The Grid just didn’t want him; and he didn’t want the fucking Grid. And the elation was this: that ugly pit of displacement inside him closed up, was just gone, when he thought about the SA bulls. The bulls threatened his life, and the threat caught him up in something that made it possible to forget about the band. He’d found a way out.

But the horror was there, too. If he got caught up in this… if the SA bulls got hold of him…

Fuck it. What else did he have?

He grinned at Carmen, and she looked blankly back at him, wondering what the grin meant.

So now what? he asked himself. Get to the OmeGaity. Find Frankie. Frankie was the doorway.

But it was taking so long to get there. Thinking. The drug’s fucking with your sense of duration. Heightened perception makes it seem to take longer.

The crowd seemed to get thicker, the air hotter, the music louder, the lights brighter. It was getting to Rickenharp. He began to lose the ability to make the distinction between things in his mind and things around him. He began to see himself as an enzyme molecule floating in some macrocosmic bloodstream—the sort of things that always OD’d him when he did an energizing drug in a sensory-overflow environment.

What am I?

Sizzling orange-neon arrows on the marquee overhead seemed to crawl off the marquee, slither down the wall, down into the sidewalk, snaking to twine around his ankles, to try to tug him into a tingler emporium. He stopped and stared. The emporium’s display holos writhed with fleshy intertwinings; breasts and buttocks jutted out at him, and he responded against his will, like all the clichés, getting hard in his pants: visual stimuli; monkey see, monkey respond. He thought: Bell rings and dog salivates.

He looked over his shoulder. Who was that guy with the sunglasses back there? Why was he wearing sunglasses at night? Maybe he’s SA—

Noooo, man. I’m wearing sunglasses at night. Means nothing.

He tried to shrug off the paranoia, but somehow it was twined into the undercurrent of sexual excitement. Every time he saw a whore or a pornographic video sign, the paranoia hooked into him as a kind of scorpion stinger on the tail of his adolescent surge of arousal. And he could feel his nerve ends begin to extrude from his skin. After having been clean so long, his-blue mesc tolerance was low.

Who am I? Am I the crowd?

He saw Carmen look at something in the street, then whisper urgently to Yukio.

“What’s the matter?” Rickenharp asked.

She whispered, “You see that silver thing? Kind of a silvery fluttering? There—over the cab… Just look, I don’t wanna point.”

He looked into the street. A cab was pulling up at the curb. Its electric motor whined as it nosed through a heap of refuse. Its windows were dialed to mercuric opacity. Above and a little behind it a chrome bird hovered, its wings a hummingbird blur. It was about thrush-sized, and it had a camera-lens instead of a head. “I see it. Hard to say whose it is.”

“I think it’s run from inside that cab. That’s like them. They’ll send it after us from there. Come on.” She ducked into a tingler gallery; Willow and Yukio and Rickenharp followed her. They had to buy a swipe card to get in. A bald, jowly old dude it the counter took the cards, swiped them without looking, his eyes locked on a wrist-TV screen. On his wrist a miniature newscaster was saying in a small tinny voice, “…attempted assassination of SA director Crandall today…” Something mumbled, distorted. “…Crandall is in serious condition and heavily guarded at Freezone Medicenter…”

The turnstile spun for them and they went into the gallery. Rickenharp heard Willow mutter to Yukio, “The bastard’s still alive.”

Rickenharp put two and two together.

The tingler gallery was predominantly fleshtone, every available vertical surface taken up by emulsified nude humanity. As you passed from one photo or holo to the next, you saw the people in them were inverted or splayed or toyed with, turned in a thousand variations on coupling, as if a child had been playing with unclothed dolls and left them scattered. A sodden red light hummed in each booth: the light snagged you, a wavelength calculated to produce sexual curiosity. In each “privacy booth” was a screen and a tingler. An oxygen mask that dropped from a ceiling trap pumped out a combination of amyl nitrite and pheromones. The tingler looked like a twentieth-century vacuum cleaner hose with an oversized salt-shaker top on one end: You watched the pictures, listened to the sounds, and ran the tingler over your erogenous zones; the tingler stimulated the appropriate nerve ends with a subcutaneously penetrative electric field, very precisely attenuated. You could pick out the guys in the health-club showers who’d used a tingler too long: use it more than the “recommended thirty-five-minute limit” and it made your skin look sunburned. One time Rickenharp’s drummer had asked him if he had any lotion: “I got ‘tingler dick,’ man.”