John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He pressed the cold glass to his forehead. Tonelessly he said, “If you can get Molt to help us, then maybe. But don’t count on any help from him. They went down to interrogate him an hour ago…”

Claire stood and backed away from him. She looked at him hard, trying to recognize him. “Dad—how do you know these things? Praeger’s ‘racial weeding’… their plans for Molt…?”

He gestured vaguely toward his console. “When I designed the comm system I… built a few safeguards into it. I can monitor Praeger’s instructions. I get them all routed to me automatically; I have his code, too.” He shrugged. “If you get Molt, I’ll talk to the technickis. But just for you. Not because I care about them. They’re a lot of E. coli in the belly of the beast.”

She stared at him. And thought: Let it go. If that was his attitude about them, it was something that she couldn’t change. Not now.

Claire turned and spoke to the door panel; it slid aside and she walked down the hall to her apartment, where she changed into her Admin Governing Committee jumpsuit, thinking: E. Coli in the belly of the beast? There was something pathological about putting it that way.

She pinned her Security pass to her collar, needing the semblance of authority. She took her father’s private lift three levels toward Admin. Security level was the entire floor below Admin—like a moat around a castle. As the lift stopped, a panel over the door lit up red with the words SECURITY—PASSES ONLY.

Her palms were damp. She wiped them on her hips and told herself, “You are in charge.”

The door opened and Claire stepped into the hallway. A camera looked at her. She held up her pass for the camera to see. Nothing stopped her as she walked down the hall.

She hesitated at the glass doors. Someone had stenciled Happy Holidays and a cluster of holly leaves on the glass, and she remembered that it was near Christmas. They would put the big artificial tree up in the Open soon. But no, not with all the vandalism that had been happening. The technicki vandals would make a wreck of it.

She went through the door. A young man smiled up at her from behind the glassy desk. Four small TV monitors to his right showed all four access corridors to Security. There was no need for him to watch them, really; the computers did it quite efficiently alone. But where possible her father had arranged for a human being to oversee cybernetic functions; the other engineers had hinted that the human backup arrangement was irrational, even eccentric.

The young man in the flat-black SAISC uniform kept smiling as he said, “How can I help you, Ms. Rimpler?” His face was pretty, almost angelic, but his hand lay on the desk within reach of the summons button. She and her father had been in Denver for a UNIC meeting when Praeger had revamped Security. They’d come back and found Second Alliance International Security Corporation men setting up new surveillance gear and sentry teams strategically throughout the Colony; the grim, gray-black uniforms could be glimpsed wherever the corridors made a nexus…

The SAISC struck her as altogether too secretive an outfit, almost cultish. There was, after all, its connection to Crandall, who was close to being a cult leader.

“I need four men to escort a prisoner from lockup,” she said, trying to sound assertive. “Samson Molt.”

The receptionist’s smile froze right where it was.

“Let me see what I can do—” He turned to the terminal, tapped a fone number; a face appeared on the screen. She couldn’t see it clearly from this angle, but she thought it was Scanlon’s. The receptionist was going to the top, which seemed out of sequence. “Ms. Rimpler is here, asking permission to see a prisoner, Samson Molt…”

“To escort him out of there,” Claire broke in. “I want to take responsibility for him. He is to be remanded to my custody. I need a few men to help me—”

Scanlon’s voice, like his digitally compressed face, was too flat, too oblique.

“The situation is dangerously unstable, Claire. Molt’s release would contradict the public information we’ve already given out; we’ve had to say repeatedly that we don’t know where he is.”

“No one believes that anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Claire, but if you’d like to put in a formal request for his transfer, we will process it and try to give you an answer within two or three weeks.”

“This is ridiculous, Scanlon. I want to talk to you face to face.” But the screen went blank. “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said blandly, the smile now completely gone. “He’s out doing fieldwork. If you’d like to make an…”

Claire turned and walked out; it was as if she were swept along by something, washed into the elevators, and not until she’d gone down to Central Telecast and found Judy in the commissary did she really take note of her surroundings.

Claire looked around the commissary, blinking, and then sighed and sank into the cracked blue plastic seat across from Judy Avickian. Judy was small, eyes nearly black, waist-length curly black hair braided for work, looped over one shoulder to dangle in front of her white and gold skin-suit. Judy liked things white and gold; her earrings were ivory on gold wires. There was a suggestion of a mustache just above the corners of her pale lips, but it wasn’t much more than a shadow, and she was an attractive woman; attractive and strong. She and Claire had had a brief fling, and then Claire had shrugged and said, “I guess I’m just heterosexual.” Now they were friends, but when certain subjects floated by on the conversational stream, Judy’s tone became acrid.

The room was too well lit, as cafeterias have always been; the vending machines built into the walls hummed, but behind the glass, the shrink-wrapped, vitamin-injected food in the little slots looked, in that harsh light, like wax imitations.

“You look pissed off,” Judy observed.

“You know it.” Claire told her what had happened at Security Central. “Two years ago it would’ve been unheard of. Those people worked for my father—for the Colony. Now they’ve…”

Judy nodded slowly, her eyes gazing at something inward. “The SAISC are invited in where there’s a power vacuum. Where somebody in collaboration with them plans to fill the vacuum.” She looked at Claire. “I was talking to a woman, the mother of a kid they arrested. She hasn’t seen the kid in a month. They won’t grant her visitor’s privileges. She thinks something’s wrong, She thinks they hurt him. Maybe he’s dead. They hit him three times with an RR stick. He was thirteen years old.”

“What’s an RR stick?”

“Recoil reversal. The recoil you’d normally feel when you hit something, the kinetic energy, is rerouted back into the point of impact a split-second later—it’s like the stick hits you twice when they hit you with it only once. The guy using it can’t judge how much force he’s used…”

“Jesus. When did you see her?”

“Two days ago. We’ve been gathering material for a story on it, but I’m not sure they’ll give us permission—” She shrugged. “The bottom line, Claire, is that UNIC is taking it all away from your father.”

Claire blinked and said, “I don’t think it’s quite that, uh…”

Judy shrugged and shook her head at the same time. “You want to get in to see Molt?”

Claire nodded.

“And you want my help?”

Claire nodded again, watching Judy. The bitterness was there. Judy’s tone said, I tried to warn you about this before. You should have trusted me, listened to me. Stayed with me.

Judy stood up. “Then let’s go get my class.”

There were four of them, Judy, Angie, Belle, and Kris. Belle and Kris were sisters, both of them tall and black. Angie was Swedish, blond and blue-eyed, her expression always fierce; she was a bulky, high-breasted, big-boned woman, and she wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of the last century’s National Socialist paintings of Aryan peasants. But Angie, Judy’s instructor, was fervently Neo-Marxist.