John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Molt was replaced by Asheem Spengle; the technicki commentator’s triple-Mohawk was comically warped by the distortion in the upper half of the screen so that he looked like a tropical bird. He said something in technicki, which was translated at the bottom of the screen in subtitles. “…And that was our excerpt from Radleader Molt’s media conference, which he gave yesterday after his release from Colony Detention… We noticed that more than once Radleader Molt referred to a written text in giving his statement. We cannot help but wonder who wrote that text. Was it indeed Radleader Molt? Or was it written for him by Colony Admin? Molt’s statement was followed by an endorsement from the Colony’s own founder, Professor Rimpler, and his daughter Claire… Clearly Molt’s involvement with these two high administration figures sheds doubt on the sincerity of his—”

Bonham changed the channel, muttering, “Bullshit.”

Another news show, this one in Standard English delicately articulated by an anchorwoman who looked like she was from the Middle East: “…have renewed their demands on a document teletyped to Admin officials today; the council of radleaders demanded a timetable for technicki integration into Admin housing projects in the Open, technicki representation in all Admin governing committees, guarantees of improved living conditions, and removal of SAISC ‘conflict prevention guards’ from technicki gathering places and hallways…” Bonham leaned forward, seeing himself on the screen, a slightly wobbly image, a burst of static fuzzing the anchorwoman’s words. He caught, “…Bonham, chairman of the Radleader council, speaking today…”

Then he heard his own voice and hated the sound of it over TV. It sounded bloodless, too high-pitched. And Prego’s damn screen was warping his image, making his head quiver like a soap bubble. He heard himself say, “…amazed they think we can be manipulated with double-talk out of George Orwell like ‘conflict prevention guards.’ Storm troopers are storm troopers.”

Bonham shrugged. It was okay. Sometimes they used a slice that made you sound a fool. But that one went right to the point.

The anchorwoman was going on to something not directly related to Bonham, and Bonham began to lose interest. “…Full power was restored to the top four sublevels today by Admin technicians, despite technicki striker efforts to sabotage the conduits to—”

“‘Con-dew-its,’” Bonham said. “Nobody uses that word anymore. But I like the shape your lips make when you use it.”

He kicked the switch with the toe of his rubber cowboy boot and sadly watched the lovely brown-eyed face compact and vanish into itself.

He looked at his watch, and thought, I’m late, just about the right amount.

Bonham got up, stretched, and picked his way through the room, through the door to the next, larger room crowded with partiers, thudding with minimono; he moved deftly through the tangle of legs, avoiding the ones who deliberately tried to trip him; he blinked against the thick smoke, thinking the smoke seemed to be moving to the music (but that couldn’t be possible, could it?), and found the door.

The After was illegal, and Admin was beginning to crack down on places like it, correctly figuring them to be hotbeds of radical fermentation. So he paused at the monitor screens, checked the hall for bulls, swiveling Prego’s camouflaged TV camera both ways. All clear.

Bonham opened the door, stepped through, closed it quickly behind him. Rubbing his eyes, he hurried down the corridor to the nearest crossover.

He passed a gaggle of technickids graffiting the corridor wall; they froze when he turned the corner, looking over their shoulders at him. He smiled and shrugged, and they grinned, relaxing. There were four of them, all about eleven years old, and they were in four colors: Hispanic derivation, black, Caucasian, and one that was maybe southeast Asian. Their jumpsuits were tricked out with buttons and patches—their parents’ tech rating patches, next to minimono wiredancers looking dolefully out from glossy buttons, as unreal as the buttons showing cartoon characters.

The corridor here was riotous with graffiti, almost black with it in places; the sloganeering that had begun it was clotted over with obscenities and identities and gang symbols. There was more gang graffiti lately, and he wondered if it was time to take the techni-kid gangs seriously as a threat.

The door into the crossover for the Open had been vandalized off its hinges. Halfway down the crossover, an SAISC guard blocked the way. Maybe the guard was that far back from the door because the ones who stood right in the doorways were just begging for a lob. Bonham had once lobbed a Molotov himself, and then thought, Am I crazy? If this place burns down there’s nowhere to run to.

Could the Colony burn? Some said yes, some said no, some said portions of it could, and there might be flammable insulation in the walls, and if flammable wire burned back to that flammable insulation, the place could fill with smoke, and even though there were theoretically enough gas masks and shelter-suits to go around, word was about a third of them had been vandalized or decayed past use… Bonham occupied his mind that way, trying to throw off the jitters and only making it worse as he walked up to the armoured guard.

He couldn’t look up into that blue-green curved-mirror face, he just couldn’t make that, so he looked at the middle of the gray-black chest and said, “Bonham, security pass 4555.” The bull tapped his wrist console. “Repeat.”

Bonham repeated it for the voice analyzer; the analyzer transmitted to Security Central’s computer, which compared the registered sound waves with Bonham’s own, checked the code number, and flashed a picture of Bonham to the tiny screen on the inside right of the guard’s mask.

“Go ahead, sir, and have a nice walk,” the bull said, stepping aside.

Bonham walked past, and looked at his watch. He picked up his pace…

…She was where she said she’d be, and she had only one bodyguard with her.

Judith Van Kips stood in the very center of the construction site. The fiberplas frame of the unfinished condo rose around her like a cage. It was a gilded cage, because the Open’s light had been filtered and tinted red-gold to make a sunset; in another hour it would be dark. The corridors, too, would dim, normally, in order to produce regular circadian rhythms. But they were well-lit full-time since the strikes, the riots…

The light from the sunward glass made black bars of shadow across the red-dirt site, across Judith Van Kips’ long, straight flaxen hair and the black uniform of the masked guard behind her.

Heart pounding, Bonham stepped through the frame of the door, thinking, If I change my mind and back out now, the bull’s going to grab me, and they won’t let anybody bust me out like Molt.

“That’s close enough,” she said.

Bonham stopped ten feet from her. “I don’t like the bull listening.”

“He’s my Personal. We can trust him. Hold still now.”

He waited it out, rigid and sweating, as the SAISC guard ran a weapon detector over him, then patted him down.

The bull put the instrument back in his belt pack and drew his gun. Judith Van Kips smiled when she saw the fear on Bonham’s face.

“It’s just in case,” she said.

Bonham shrugged, just as if he hadn’t been a fraction of a reflex away from rushing that gun. “You and Praeger bought that bozo Spengle.”

She didn’t say anything to that.

He went on, “I’m going to cost more than Spengle.” He smiled. “Some journalists are more expensive than others.”

She waited.

The breeze, the carefully engineered breeze, played with the precisely cut ends of her flaxen hair, drifting them across her carefully engineered face, a face too perfect to be natural.