John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Mr. Purchase, I’m getting a rising heartbeat rate and a respiration signal on you that’s a little worrisome. I think you’d better hold it right there—”

As Purchase turned with the gun in his hand.

But the one on the right had taken a step closer and had his RR stick out. The stick was already whistling down at his head, and Purchase didn’t even get the pistol’s safety off. He felt the crunch and the explosion of pain, and nothing else.

The bull had hit him a little too hard—maybe because of the gun—and Purchase was still comatose in an SA-owned hospital six months later when, after the fourth extraction try proved futile, the euthanasia judge signed the papers and Worldtalk pulled the plug.

And then Purchase finished dying.

The Radic technickis controlled only a relatively small part of the Colony. The back section of Corridor D and, for a while, about half the technicki dorms. On the twenty-seventh day of the occupation, a little over two months after the Russians had blockaded the Colony, Security stormed the barricaded dorms and retook them. About twenty percent of the Radics were taken prisoner. And Security found the body of Guy Wilson, ripe from decay, in Wilson’s sealed dorm room. Wilson had been beaten to death, “probably with the butt of a rifle.” The Admin—not citing its evidence—officially charged Samson Molt with Wilson’s murder, in absentia. It warned the technickis, over InterColony and intercom, that Molt was “still at large.”

In fact, Molt and the Radics’ hard-core had been driven back, into Corridor D. They sealed off the corridor behind them and now occupied the burnt-out corridor mall, the cafeteria and its kitchens, and the corridor’s main passageway. But they were in touch, via hastily rigged wifi transmitters, with technicki sympathizers on the outside of the barricaded area. And it was this source that got word to Bonham and Molt that the bulls were coming in force now from every main access, were massing around the bend in the corridor and in the transverse passage that led into the corridor area from the dorms. They were carrying flashlights and rifles.

Minutes after this report came through, the lights went out in Corridor D.

Immediately there were panicky shouts insisting that no one panic, no one panic, and flashlight beams stabbed at the ceiling, the walls, as if trying to see through them, to see the unseen enemy…

Bonham had known the exact time the power cut would come. He and Claire had rendezvoused at the intersection of Corridor D and Transverse 67. Forty yards back from the front barricade. The front barricade, on the Admin side, was the most heavily guarded.

The rear barricade had only three men on it, because the sympathizers on the outside had not reported significant Security activity in the end of the corridor. The Radics’ sabotage had wrecked transverse access to the rear barricade area. The bulls couldn’t get through that way without clearing away great mounds of debris.

The only other way they could come from behind would be from the rear launch levels. The Security bulls could, conceivably, take pods or repair shuttles from the Admin area through space to the rear launch and get at the back barricade that way. But the rear launch levels were far smaller than the Admin launch levels. They could accommodate only two small vehicles at once… And only about five men could come through the small airlock at any one time. The process of bringing in men that way would be time-consuming and could be monitored by the Radics’ crudely rigged TV surveillance system. But the power cut had turned off the Radics’ surveillance gear as well as the lights. The rear was blinded. The three men on the back barricade argued about what to do—the Radic-occupied territory was clearly being attacked from the front, one of them argued, so they should go and help support the front barricades. The others argued for staying where they were.

Bonham and Claire waited in a dark doorway to one side, listening to the argument.

Claire whispered, “What if they stay on the barricades?”

“They’ll let me through. They’re used to seeing me as a leader.” But there was no certainty in his voice.

The pitch-black corridor area was shot through with lances of light. Pools of illumination danced over walls and ceiling, quivering with an urgency that corresponded with the shouted directions, and arguments, and more cries of “Don’t panic!” And thirty feet to Claire’s left, the senior of the three guards was shouting, “All right, fuck it, we’ll stay, but if Molt…” The rest was garbled by interruptions from the others.

Claire huddled against the cold metal wall, chewing a knuckle, searching through the fragmented darkness for a glimpse of her father in the patches of light. “Goddammit, where’s Dad?… Damn him! I told him, I wrote it down for him where we’d be—”

“You should have brought him with you.”

“Molt had me on barricade duty. It wasn’t safe for Dad to be out there with me where everyone could see him, he’d start ranting and they’d—you know—”

She shrugged. He didn’t see her shrug in the dark, but he understood her.

The old man was crouched under the big mixing table in the cafeteria kitchen, smiling absently in the darkness. The darkness was almost complete. Now and then a light splashed the wall across from him as someone carrying a flashlight ran past. His world was dark but splashed with light; it was cold, and yet he felt feverish, and that was like space itself: black but shattered with light, cold but charged with radioactive heat. Maybe, he thought, this is an old-fashioned omen. A taste of what’s to come—when the Colony’s turned inside out and we’re all dissipated into the void.

Rimpler’s back ached. Without thinking, he shifted his position to ease the ache. That turned him enough so he could see the luminous dial of the pocket watch Claire had scrounged for him. Automatically, he registered the hour, and saw it was past time for him to meet Claire.

The time demanded a decision. And a decision came, one that had been struggling to get out of him for days. He’d sat there in the darkness for an hour, not thinking about any one thing in particular—but all the time some part of his mind had been thinking, and by degrees coming to one starkly unavoidable conclusion. He’d had a towering responsibility, had willfully taken it on himself. And just as willfully had thrown it aside. Jettisoned it. And now he was going to have to try to find it again. And never mind that it was impossible, and that it was too late. He was going to have to try and take it back.

He wondered if he should try to explain to her, make her understand what he had to do. How would he put it? Claire—I made it possible for thousands of people to move into another world, to start over, and they turned against me and I handled it badly. And I lost the world I made… He could imagine her response.

“You telling me that Jehovah has been disenfranchised?” She had more of her mother in her than she liked to admit.

I’ve been asleep, Claire. I put part of myself to sleep because of what happened to Terry—and because the thing I spent my life building fell apart around me. Now I’m going to take charge again, and make it right.

What would she say to that? She’d say it was a childish fantasy. That it wouldn’t work. And he knew it probably wouldn’t work.

He remembered telling Claire about the tower a man built himself into over the years, the tower of convictions and habits and ineradicable decisions. He visualized his own personal tower of Babel, and in the vision he saw it tottering, beginning to shiver apart…

And the trouble was—he wasn’t in that tower alone. He had every man, woman, and child in the Colony up there with him.