John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

She’d married, but her best friend, a feminist, had persuaded Kitty to keep her last name. She was still Kitty Torrence.

Kitty’s job on FirStep was simple and ugly. She kept the sludge pipes in the recycling center from clogging. Kitty was a wide-framed woman, her hair brown and coarse, her features blunt, hands and feet a little too big. She’d once overheard someone calling her “horsey.” Okay; she was not a pretty woman, and not unusually intelligent. But she was strong and determined, and her eyes were a nice shade of blue, almost violet, and Lester adored her.

The recycling center was an enormous barn-shaped room with aluminum-gray walls and six-foot-thick flat-black pipes. The joints of the pipes were dull silver. Harsh fluorescent light buzzed overhead; steam and rancid smells escaped from loose pipe joints; the atmosphere was faintly cloudy, like a glass of gin left out for a couple of days.

Kitty’s legs hurt, and she was thirsty. Parched. Her lips were cracked. There was a steady, dull background heat in the room, and in it swam the human odors wrung from the disposable clothing. The heat, noise, and smell were always there, and after a while it felt strange to go out into the corridor where the air was cooler and cleaner—and so much quieter.

Because the pipes roared all day. They roared and groaned, as discarded one-use garments and other refuse from the previous two days, heated by the same chemical process that liquefied it, bubbled and slopped through the pipes. No one knew why the pipes gave out those pathetically human groaning noises, but the superstitious technickis assumed the ghosts of Samson Molt and Professor Rimpler were trapped in the pipes, because probably Admin had simply fed them into the recyclers. The younger technickis—the younger ones were more superstitious—would hear the groans and mutter, “Cover me, Gridfriend…”

The four biggest pipes emerged from the wall to the right, slanted down to the first separation vats; a plethora of smaller pipes sprouted from the vats. A catwalk ran along the pipes and around the enormous vats, and Kitty walked along the catwalk, checking to see that the pipes weren’t clogging. The colonists used disposable clothes most of the time because laundering would consume too much volume, too much water on the Colony, and because there were strict weight limits on what could be shipped up from Earth; the weight allowance for clothing was small. Each dorm or living unit had its own garment printer; blocks of the raw garment material, to be fed into the printer like reams into a photocopier, were delivered once a week. Some wore cloth clothing on the Colony; there were even boutiques. But most preferred the economy and flexibility of disposable clothing. Print it out in any style you programmed the printer for that day. Wear it twice and toss it into the chute. The chute took it to the sludge pipes, where it was soaked in Breakdown, which broke it down into sludge with the other recycled trash; its main components were drawn by inertia and the Colony’s centrifugal force down to recycling, down to the big pipes where Kitty walked along the catwalk.

Kitty was five months pregnant, but it didn’t show a whole lot. She wore a shift to help conceal it. She was afraid they’d lay her off if they knew she was pregnant. But the supervisor was technicki; she knew what conditions were like for technicki, she knew Kitty and her husband needed the work credit.

Every five steps Kitty had to stop and slide open the little window on the top of the pipe; usually a little sludge spat up at her when she did this and she’d snatch her hand away to keep from getting sludge and Breakdown on it. She’d hold on to the rail and peer into the pipe, and if she saw it was gumming up, she’d use the sludge fork clamped inside the window to clear away the blockage. Then she’d close the window and go on to the next joint. And when she got to the vat, she’d cross over to the other side, go back up the next pipe. And when she got to the wall, she’d cross over, go back down the pipes again. On and on like that all day.

She guessed it was better than working down in Fecal Sewage where Mary Beth worked. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, because the traffic between Earth and the Colony was so reduced, and the Colony had been damaged in the vandalism, sabotage, the riots of the Technicki Rebellion. Now that the comm transmitters were damaged and they were waiting, endlessly, for comm parts to be sent from Earth, Kitty’s husband had to make do with occasional video maintenance work. The Colony wasn’t going to let anyone starve, it was said; if you couldn’t pony up the work-cred for food, they gave you rations—bad food and not enough of it. These were difficult, transitory times, Admin told them. Have to tighten the belts a few notches. But it would be over soon.

The rebellion was over, after all. The mirror-helmeted Second Alliance security bulls were everywhere. Praeger and the Admin council had complete power. The union assemblies had been suspended. Martial law was in effect.

But somehow the sabotage was still happening. The TV lines had been disrupted by some vandal—wild laughter, static, distorted images. The extra air-purification parts in storage had been damaged by runaway warehouse robots. The food in cold storage was damaged when the refrigeration had turned itself off, refused to go back on for twenty-four hours. And yet there seemed to be no whisper of an active technicki rebellion…

What would happen, she wondered, if the New-Soviets won the war on Earth? Would they take over the Colony? Would they blow it out of the sky?

A broad ripple of nausea ran through her; the rancidness from the pipe seemed to deepen, the heat seemed to increase. She had to stop and lean on the railing of the catwalk, turn away from the pipes, and retch for a few moments. God, how she had wanted to get pregnant, have Lester’s baby. A beautiful little golden baby, caramel colored like its dad… but she regretted it now—now that she had to hide it. If they found out, they’d make her leave her job, go to Colony parenthood monitoring to see if they’d even permit her to have the baby. And since Lester was black, and the Second Alliance was running things, they probably wouldn’t issue the permit. They’d find some excuse to disallow it. Unless she could wait long enough, so the baby was a fait accompli. But moments like this… feeling sick and too heavy and tired all the time…

She saw the supervisor, Mrs. Chiswold, standing by the vat, looking up at her with a worried expression; probably worried she’d have to let Kitty go.

Kitty smiled, and stretched as if she’d just been taking a little rest, then stamped back to the pipes, forced herself to stare into the endless subterranean river of sludge. And let her mind wander till she found herself wondering what had become of her brother, in Europe. Danny. Poor Danny. He was probably dead.

Torrence was thinking, We’ll probably be dead by sunset, the latest.

He and Claire and Danco were hunkered down in a shallow, crater-shaped depression atop a house-size mound of rock, waiting for the SA choppers to make another pass. They squinted against the austere winter sunlight, shivered when the breeze knifed them. Torrence’s hands were stiff on the auto-shotgun. Claire, sitting beside the small missile launcher, blew in her hands to keep them warm.

“How they find us?” Danco wondered aloud, his dark eyes darting from side to side as he scanned the cloud-lidded sky. He said something else, but it was lost in the rattle of gunfire as Willow’s group met another onrush from SA ground troops, up ahead, with a wall of bullets.

“Probably found us with infrared scans,” Torrence said. “This is a good area for it. Not much else up here that’s warm to confuse the tracking. Doesn’t matter.” He heard the resignation in his own voice and thought, I sound dead already.