John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Rimpler had turned the newscast off halfway through. And he’d made himself a drink. He wore the same shorts, the same grimy bathrobe. He hadn’t shaved.

He sat on the rug beside the sofa, making another drink, humming to himself. She watched as he dropped a pill into the drink. It fizzled.

“Dad—what are you putting in your drinks?”

“A little something to give them more punch. Making them into Punchy Punch.” He sipped, and shuddered. Then his eyes became languid, the lids drooped, and he began to talk. “When you’re a young man, or woman, Claire, you try to build things. Businesses or homes or books or space stations or… schools of ideas. You have a wide freedom of choice as a young person. Relatively speaking. As you grow, you build on to what you’ve built, and on to that, and onto that, and you attach yourself to it, and you create a sort of web of… of conceptions and misconceptions of the world. Wrong or right, these ideas solidify around you, and hem you in. And you do things in accordance with the ideas, and, then… why then you must justify what you do, if you are to live with yourself. So your choices diminish until you are no longer making them, you are simply building a pattern on a pattern. It’s like a man who’s built a skyscraper with his own two hands—I saw a Popeye thing like this as a boy on TVLand—the skyscraper got to be up in the clouds, and he was up there, atop it, but he hadn’t built stairs and there was no way down or off, so he had to keep building, up, up… Where he gets the materials I don’t know, and there the analogy breaks down…”

He’s completely maundering, Claire thought. Who’s Popeye?

“Dad—we’ve got to make up our minds where we stand on this thing…”

“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’ve built myself into the Admin and I must support Admin. Right or wrong. I’ve gone as far as I can with you.”

“You know there’s no ‘right or wrong.’ The way things are now, Admin is just plain wrong.”

“Yes.” Dreamily. “I believe we are.”

“But you don’t care.”

“I can’t do anything about it.”

“Even if you can’t take a stand, you can help me in other ways. I’m barred from council sessions now. You’re not.”

“I’ll tell you what I learn… if they let me go,” he said, nodding.

“How can you accept it all so passively!”

“Please don’t shout.”

She felt near weeping. “You weren’t like this before.”

“No. But since then I’ve seen them. I’ve seen into them. And this man Molt must go. His being here risks the peace of my retreat…” He gestured at the room around him with his drink. “My… hermitage, my dear, dear child. You fail to understand how serious our Praeger is. Because you don’t know who he is. Praeger is one of the chiefs of the Second Alliance. They wish to make the Colony their world headquarters—when the blockade is lifted. Crandall wants to come here. He feels safer here. Ironic, as things are now. But if they could perfect their control, they could turn the place into a perfect police state. It would ‘hum with harmony,’ to use Praeger’s charming phrase. It would be safer for Crandall.”

“How did you get all this?” Her voice came out a croak. “About the SA’s plans for the colony and…?”

“You always seem surprised by my keeping tabs on the thing I built myself. Why, my dear child, I tapped their comms… they had run tether satellites out to transmit past the blockade… to Crandall’s farm. To a man named Swenson. And a certain Watson. Even their names sound alike to me. Swenson and Watson. Praeger and Jaeger. These people are the vectors for the new conformity, and maybe they’ll all change their names to sound alike, Watson, Wilson, Winston; Crandall, Kendall, Randall, Rendell—”

“Dad—you’re saying that the Security Section is now a political organization?”

“It’s run by one. The new fascists, dear girl.”

The door opened.

Claire looked up at the door in shock. No one was supposed to be able to open it from the outside with a key, except…

Except Security.

Two Security bulls stood in the door, one with a face, the other faceless. But the one with a face might just as well have worn a helmet, for all his expression told them. It was friendly, with a faint regret. He was a Security administrator whose name she couldn’t remember. He was here for the sake of decorum. Professor Rimpler was not some technicki bumpkin.

“Professor Rimpler.” the administrator said politely. “Claire Rimpler. I have executive orders to bring you with me, for questioning and detention, in connection with a detention-cell breakout and the maiming of three guards.”

“May I finish my drink?” Rimpler asked. Casually, just as if he didn’t know full well that these men had come to take him to prison; as if he didn’t know that it was a prison he would never come away from.

“Certainly, sir,” the administrator said, smiling.

“Took them a while to make up their minds they could politically get away with arresting us,” Rimpler mused, rattling the ice in his glass. “Or maybe they simply needed time to arrange the appropriate political background.”

“As to that, I couldn’t say, sir,” the administrator said, glancing at his watch.

Claire looked around. The moment, the arrest, made everything look different. How little we normally notice, she thought.

Now the whole room seemed to spring into relief. The walls were adjusted to a soft, dimpled texture, making her think of a padded cell. The two men standing in the arch of the doorway were remarkably detailed; she saw every fiber in their armored suits, every stud on their belts, every pouch and fastener and wrinkle. She noted the play of light across the faceplate of the one on her left. She heard a faint squeak and rustle of synthetic material as he shifted his weight. She could hear him breathe, very faintly, through his helmet amplifier, even dialed to low output.

She was listening for something else. Molt.

Molt was in the next room, sleeping. He slept whenever they would let him, taking tranks cut with antidream. The administrator hadn’t said anything about him; hadn’t looked at the bedroom. Maybe they didn’t know he was here.

She’d taken pains to make them think Molt was hiding somewhere behind the Corridor D barricades, with the other radicals, technickis and the Admin progressives like Judy and Angie and Belle and Kris who were sympathetic to the tecknickis. She looked at the guard’s RR stick, on his belt. His right hand was resting on its pommel. Not threateningly. A little behind the stick was the gun in its locked holster.

Claire listened…

Molt sometimes moaned in his sleep.

Professor Rimpler finished his drink, sighing, setting it down with a clack.

He stood and said, “Well, shall we go, Claire?” The Security administrator smiled approvingly.

The bedroom door opened. The administrator looked at it, his smile fading. The bull drew his RR.

There was a faint hiss.

A small hole, a centimeter across, appeared in the center of the guard’s chest. He shouted some meaningless monosyllable.

The administrator threw himself down.

There was a whumpf and the guard’s suit expanded like a balloon, in a split-second puffing the chest to four times its normal size. Blood jetted from the tiny hole, squirting out in a neat arc. The bull’s arms snapped up and down, once, and he fell over backward. He hit the corridor’s floor with a wet sound, blood fountaining in a thin stream from the single hole. His suit began to deflate. Slowly.

Molt stepped through the open bedroom door and pointed the thing in his hands at the administrator on the floor. The man was getting to his feet and now truth showed in his face: it was contorted with naked fear.