John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The house wore its wood the way status-conscious socialites had once worn their minks. It had been “made out of the wood of the trees they found growing right here on the land, the way my brother wanted it,” Ellen Mae had told him. “He likes things natural and simple, the way God likes them. God gave us dominion over all things of this world.”

That’s his problem, Swenson thought. He confuses what he likes with what God likes, all the way down the line.

And then he chided himself for falling out of character. Don’t even think things like that.

She was standing over him now, and he looked up into her face—a face that looked craggier than ever in the uneven light, and he felt a purl of despair. I not only have to make love to this woman, I have to do it well. I have to make her want more.

“How’s it look?” she said.

He stammered a moment, then realized she meant the report. “Um—I think it’s just about ready.”

Ellen Mae placed a hand on the table close to his left elbow and bent over him to look at the report, her arm around him like a schoolteacher looking at the work of a favorite child; his skin crackled with the slight furriness of her cheek. He felt a wave of revulsion—followed quickly by arousal, and he wondered where that was coming from.

“It looks fine,” she said, scanning, flipping through it. Probably not really looking at all. Her breath smelled like iron.

She straightened and put her hands on his shoulders. “Let’s visit Rick and we can give him this.”

Oh, shit, he thought.

But aloud he said: “Great!” Sprightly as he could make it. He shuffled the papers together, put them in a folder, and added, “But maybe he’ll want to see this as a readout. I could put the corrections on a datastick—”

“He wants it tonight if he can get it,” she said. She sighed. “He shouldn’t be working at night—he shouldn’t be working at all—but just try to keep him from it.”

Ellen Mae said it reverently.

It was like finding a secret passage that led from a home into a hospital.

They turned a corner, and the wooden hallways ended. Abruptly, they were in a long white hall: white tile floors, white walls; shiny pieces of medical apparatus on steel tables equipped with rollers, looking malevolently arcane, waited to be wheeled in to Crandall’s room if the doctors needed it. There were three doctors here, specialists who were staying on at Cloudy Peak while Crandall was convalescing.

Were the doctors in the SA? Swenson wondered. They must be, for security reasons. Swenson reflected on the surprising number of educated men in the SA. Even intellectuals. But then, the driving force of the neofascist French New Right were its intellectuals. It was an old paradox: a powerful mind was no proof against stupidity. Ideas rooted in brutality had an emotional origin. Emotion could make any notion seem reasonable. Stay in character, even in your mind.

There was an SAISC guard standing in the doorway, his face hidden in a dark green-blue helmet. He stood with his legs braced apart, one gloved hand clasped over his wrist. He was like a living gun.

But he stepped aside, seeing Ellen Mae. She didn’t even glance at him; it was as if he were a wall fixture.

And then Swenson followed her through, and there was Crandall, in bed, smiling up at them.

Swenson smiled back. But he couldn’t look Crandall in the eye. So he looked around the room. On the tables beside the bed were framed pictures, some of Ellen Mae alone, one of Ellen Mae and their parents, who were said to be living on a ranch somewhere in New Mexico. In the picture Ellen Mae and her parents were sitting together on the bench of a picnic table. Ellen Mae looked like her father.

And she looked like Crandall. And Crandall had a lean, wolfish face that might have belonged to a backwoods imbecile—except for the personality shining through it, transforming it in some subtle way. The personality, the benevolence on a foundation of sheer self-certainty, made that inbred country face something magnetic.

Crandall had never been married. He said he was married to his mission. But in total there were four pictures of Ellen Mae, and Swenson wondered if there was some kind of repressed undercurrent of incest between Ellen Mae and Smiling Rick Crandall.

A bank of instruments clicked and peeped on the wall behind Crandall. From one of them a tube had extruded to sink its single silvery fang into a vein in Crandall’s left forearm.

The room was decorated in soft white; the cabinets across from the bed were topped by pots holding a small forest of cream colored flowers. Swenson pictured the SA bomb detection team going through each vase and afterward meticulously putting the flowers back the way they’d been, and he almost laughed aloud.

He became aware of the tension knotting his chest then; he could see his own impending hysteria like the foreshortened horizon of a cliff’s edge in the distance.

He fought it by sinking roots into the character, into Swenson.

Here’s the trick, Purchase had told him. You have to be like a perfectly camouflaged bug in a fone. If it’s made right, the antibugging team could take the fone apart and not find the bug. You’ve got to operate like a fone, buzz like a fone, do everything that a fone does, just exactly, and not transmit until it’s time to transmit and then do it without breaching the illusion you’re just a fone. You’ve got to think you’re an ordinary “fone” until that moment.

But still, he thought, I could grab the guard’s gun, I could kill them both right here. Sacrifice myself. Get it over with.

Only that wouldn’t stop the SA. There was still Watson, and the others.

So he looked at Crandall and told himself, This man’s a hero. This man’s a martyr. This man is here on a Holy Mission for God. This man is here to purify the world.

And looking at Crandall, you could believe it. Even when he sat up, and they could see the bandages swathing his bony chest, and he muttered as he fumbled with the TV control unit to make the thin, filmy screen unreel from the ceiling.

“Something coming on TV, I want ya’ll to see it,” he said.

The viddy membrane dominated its part of the room. It held a perfect 3D image of a submarine surfacing, the water parting for the vessel like lace-edged stage-curtains.

“…As the art of making the ocean ‘transparent’ has improved,” the commentator said, “techniques for making Russian submarines quieter improved almost simultaneously. This Russian ‘bottom-crawler,’ when in its cruising mode and not using its treads to crawl on the bottom, is outfitted with a new sound-damping device which absorbs the noise of its nuclear reactor’s noisy cooling equipment, making it virtually impossible to detect with the sound surveillance system of hydrophones the Navy has planted along North America’s continental shelf. Russian teams of saboteurs comb the shelves in bottomcrawlers, destroying fiberoptic sensor cables where they find them, further reducing our ability to detect enemy subs. The NSA has reported that the Russian ability to detect our submarines is enhanced by a new system of ocean-bed-implanted computers which monitor seabed vibrations and search for turbulence-vibrations typical of submarines. These developments threaten the delicate balance of deterrence that prevents the use of strategic nuclear weapons in the Russian-NATO war. If the Russians can detect American submarines carrying nuclear weapons, they could eliminate them, making a Russian first strike more practical.”

Crandall switched off the sound. Images of deep-sea military juggernauts hunched silently across the screen. “Now, of course,” Crandall drawled, “Mrs. Anna Bester might just be angling for more military funding, releasing this stuff. I had my misgivings about a woman president, but by gosh, the woman is no weak bleeding heart… But if this new threat to American subs is on the level, the SAISC might just have what they used to call a ‘window of opportunity.’ Our clandestine surveillance department has come up with something new we just might be able to trade to the Department of Defense for a little unbending on Our Work in Europe. If they gave us better logistical support, we’d have the European situation sewn up.”