A Song Called Youth (104 page)

They’d left in the old stained-glass windows, those that had survived, but they’d put in a Second Circle cross on the altar. A big steel Christian cross, with the hologram attachment down at its base.

The boy Jebediah, with his two armored bulls for bodyguards, stood beside the cross, talking softly to the roomful of recruits; softly, but to Barrabas, somehow, the boy could almost have been whispering directly into his ear. The kid was like some toy action-figure in his scaled-down, immaculately tailored uniform: A flat-black uniform with black gloves and wide black belt; the Second Circle symbol on his arm patch: the eye over the cross. Jebediah had brown hair and deep-set glittering blue eyes, an almost girlish face and a voice that hadn’t changed yet, telling them, like a perfect little angel, “When I met Rick Crandall, everything changed for me, and I had the wonderful fortune to see what many adults never see.” Reciting it, but he had the trick of making it sound as if he’d never said it before. “I saw God’s divine plan for us. It’s all in one word.
Purity.”
A dramatic pause. “Purity is cleanliness, and if you’re not clean, you’re in sickness. As we’ve seen in the last several years, the world is in great sickness. What we have before us is the job of doing more than a little tidying. Purifying is a very strong word, and Rick means it in its absolute sense. He
means
the word to be strong!”

The kid was the Second Alliance’s idea of a kind of USO show, supposed to go around to all the troops and cheer them up. “Psyche you up good,” McDonnell had said. “So listen up.” Up, everything was up. Up the White Brotherhood.

Barrabas glanced around at the others. They were rapt; the kid had them in his soft, rosy little palm.

But to Barrabas, the kid seemed less like a sending from God. To Barrabas he seemed like a well-oiled robot. And maybe a bit around the bend. What ten-year-old kid could talk like this with such conviction and still be in his right mind?

Finishing, the kid said breathlessly, “God has put his sacred blueprint in each and every one of us. Behold.” The boy switched on the hologram.

Humming faintly, a three-dimensional representation of a DNA molecule shimmered into being around the stainless-steel cross. Above it floated an eye. “This is the configuration”—the kid, to Barrabas’s satisfaction, had a little trouble saying “configuration”—“of genes which can be found as part of the DNA chain of each and every man in this room. It is the distinctive DNA marking of the Upper Caucasian race. And as you can see, God watches over it. And in our own smaller way, it’s our job to protect it too . . . ” And that was it. The kid led them in a hymn: “Racial Purity Is Thy Will.” Then he smiled shyly and turned off the hologram.

McDonnell, tears in his eyes like a little kid himself, prompted the recruits into a standing ovation and a hymn as the boy, carrying his hologram box under one arm and Crandall’s Corrected Bible under the other, was escorted from the chapel.

The service ended. Barrabas shook his head, walking out into sunlight. What had happened? That morning he’d been feeling good, feeling like a part of something bigger than himself, and loving it. Feeling strong in it.

But something—maybe the drug, maybe the sight of the self-righteous little prig talking about the genes . . . 

Maybe that was it. All that talk of genes was too close to talk of breeding, which sounded like aristocracy. Class stuff. You had to stick with white people over the wogs, but this stuff about genes, that was right in line with notions of royalty. Set his teeth on edge.

“Barrabas!” McDonnell said, stepping up beside him. He took Barrabas by the arm and led him off to the side of the little group lining up for lunch. Barrabas was shaken: How had McDonnell known the treason he’d been thinking? Was it written on his face?

But it wasn’t that. “You’re getting your orders early,” McDonnell said, handing him the papers. “You’re going to Lab Six, up by London somewhere. They’re not giving out the location. Sending someone to pick you up.”

“What?” Barrabas blinked at him.

“You’ve got some kind of camera skills?”

“I did some video work, is all—”

“It’s that and they’ve decided you’ve got the right attitude or something. I didn’t get the lowdown.” He was a little apologetic. “You’ll see action later, you can count on it. They want you to vid some kind of experiment . . . He shrugged, and clapped Barrabas on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

He walked away. Barrabas stared after him.

He wasn’t going to Paris. He was going to . . . Lab Six?

He looked at the papers. Yeah. Lab Six.

• 04 •

The outskirts of Paris, France.

Dan Torrence sat in a rotting easy chair with his feet up. Roseland glanced at Torrence, could see only his Hard-Eyes in a bar of harsh light coming through the slat. Roseland was hunched on a wooden box beside him. They were hunkered down in a blind made of trash. It looked like the rest of the roof: a trash heap, stuff thrown from the taller, adjacent building by some errant Soviet shell the previous year. Sheathed in damp cardboard, black plastic sacking, ancient broken rooftile, and a half-gutted mattress matted with a rain-gooey beard of stuffing, they watched through the shaded slats as the guards changed at Processing Center 13.

The night was almost warm, but it was damp in the blind and reeked of mildew. Roseland bent and peered through the lower slat, watched the Second Alliance bulls, seven stories below, gathered in a knot of high-tech body armor, talking, laughing. One of them had his helmet off, was smoking a cigarette. Roseland could just make out the coal of his cigarette, faintly pulsing as the guard inhaled. “They’re more armored than they were before,” Roseland said softly.

“Your breakout shook ’em up,” Torrence said.

Behind the glare of floodlights and beside the mound of rubble that had been PC 12, Processing Center 13 was shaped like a stubby high-rise made of rectangular shadows. Only one light was visible, at the guard’s office, second floor.

“You know, we’d never get tower evacuation before their reinforcements come,” Torrence said.

Roseland swallowed, a painful scraping in his dry throat. “There’s got to be a way.” He had to say what he’d been thinking, and had tried not to say, for too long. “You waited too long already. I mean—didn’t you guys
know?”

“There aren’t very damn many of us,” Torrence said defensively. “Some of us sprang a work camp, up in Belgium. Four hundred refugees were killed. We lost
forty
fighters, man. We’re hoping that . . . well, we’ve got some people working politically. Trying to get the pressure on to stop this shit from the outside. While we concentrate on what Steinfeld calls pressure points.” There was a shrug in Torrence’s voice.

“We can’t let this go on anymore,” Roseland said.

Torrence nodded. “We’re risking it all, but . . . ” He sighed. “There’s a way, maybe. We’ve got a man who thinks he can get into a Jægernaut. We could use it to block the reinforcements, give us a chance to move the others out . . . ” He shrugged. “I dunno . . . ”

A Jægernaut. Roseland’s heart revved at the thought. The justice of it.
Go with it, sell Torrence on the idea. “
That’d work. It’d be a propaganda victory, too . . . the Jægernauts are a symbol. And hey, you got to understand, you’ll triple your recruits after this, at least,” Roseland pointed out.

“Most of those we rescue won’t be capable of fighting,” Torrence said. “They’ll need medical help. Getting them to safety once we break them out is a logistical nightmare. We’re gonna try to get them to the NATO hospital and hope they’re believed . . . ”

“So what do we do at this end?”

“Get them at shift change. They do it all at once—so we’ll do it that way too. All but two are together, then. We get most of them at once, with armor piercers, and they don’t hole up anywhere. We can’t handle a siege situation; we’ve got to get
in,
fast.”

“What about the two upstairs?”

“Have to hit them with an RPG.”

“Blow the office from out here? That’ll take out maybe half the floor above them, kill some prisoners.”

“I don’t think it can be helped.” Torrence’s voice had no apology in it. “We haven’t got time to do it any other way. We’ve got all those people to move out . . . ”

“They’re going to be scared,” Roseland said, “and an explosion’ll scare ’em worse.” He felt lame saying it. It sounded trivial, but it wasn’t. Only, it was hard to explain how it wasn’t. “They saw what happened to PC 12 . . . ”

“They’ll come with us; they won’t have a choice,” Torrence said.

Roseland nodded.
None of us have a whole lot of choice,
he thought.

He realized, then, that he was scared of being killed in this raid. Breaking out of PC 12, he hadn’t been scared of dying. That was living death. He’d seen people die every day. He’d seen people spiritually murdered, too. Death had seemed a strangely viable option.

Now he was ashamed to realize he wanted to live again; ashamed because of what had happened to Gabrielle; to the children he had seen dragged away, and beaten, or dying of cholera with not even an aspirin to soothe them.

His gut churned with the wrongness of his own survival. He thought about his mother, and remembered that she’d let herself die after his dad had gone. She’d been healthy, but then she mostly refused to eat, and wasted away. She had let pneumonia get her. She’d known what to do.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“About what?” Torrence asked, glancing at him, his Hard-Eyes going into shadow when he turned.

“Never mind,” Roseland said. “Thinking aloud.”

He stared out the blind at the Processing Center . . . 

Torrence stared at him for a few moments. “Let’s get out of here before they do heatseeker check. They send up those fucking birds sometimes, spot checking.”

“Let’s do it.”

They crawled out the back way, through a tunnel of trash.

Just outside of Tijuana, Mexico.

Jerome-X was sick of being cooped up. This was almost as bad as the fucking jail.

Not that there was anything appealing outside the building. I mean, fuck it: Go ahead, go outside. He’d seen it, coming in on the plane. In the distance, maybe four miles from here, was the outskirts of Tijuana. Junkyards, abandoned resorts, shantytowns. Around “the ranch” was just desert—a tarantula-haunted, scorpion-infested, ugly brown dusty desert. Cactus and twisted little gray trees, and along the cracked, empty concrete highway the occasional rusty car pocked with bullet holes.

Not even a goddamn cantina around the ranch.

The ranch. An old therapeutic spa for bogus cancer cures, purchased by Witcher and converted for the NR.

Jerome-X sat in the air-conditioned, cinder-block lecture room in a wheelchair. That was what they had to sit in, old, motorless wheelchairs, with rusty spokes. They came with the ranch. “If you aren’t crippled before you sat in this thing,” he mumbled to Bones, “you will be afterward.”

Bones—gaunt, zombie-phlegmatic, ghetto-black Bones—shook his head at him once, smiling but reproachful. Meaning: Shut up and pay attention.

There were seven students, counting Jerome-X and the little girl, and there was the instructor, Bettina: a three-hundred-fifty-pound (Jerome’s chip calculated) black woman with Rasta’ed hair; she was close to six feet tall, sweating despite the air-conditioning, wearing a printout shift. It was a pink Tuffpaper dress, a cheap brand that used the same patterns for its line of paper towels. As the day wore on, her sweat would make the dress deteriorate, bit by bit, under her arms, crumbling its edges into little pink worms of synthetic paper-cloth.

The floor shuddered faintly as she strode back and forth in front of the holographic illustrator, tapping factors into place with her fingernail cursor, explicating the computer underground in her hoarse New Orleans drawl.

The holustrator had been an object of fascination for Jerome-X the first few days he was here. When it was turned on, it looked like an astrolabe of translucent neon lines, hovering in the air about six feet across. The 3D cursors moved about in the faintly reticulating globe like fireflies in geometric formation; formations that split into contrary asymmetries as luminous, floating numbers flickered by. “Computer viruses,” Bettina had explained that first day, “and yo’ so-called computer ‘tapeworms,’ were de pests of de end of de twentieth century . . . ”

And despite advances in decryption and the use of hard partitioning write-protects, the only thing that reliably resisted the predatory viral programs was the cybernetic immune system provided by parallel programming. The “clean” system of the secondary and tertiary computers interlinked with the primary mainframe to watch over the primary programs. “But—dere are ways: A smart enough virus can redirect de code traffic to fool de guardian computer. And if we git ourselves parallel progammed—lotta brain chips working together—we stand a better chancea outsmartin’ de guardian. We use de holustrator to practice dat cooperation. We learna be awarea one another as on-line processing factors . . . ”

They were here to improve their chip-to-chip communication for underground information dispersal. And for one other, more trenchant reason . . . 

To learn to be human computer viruses . . . 

It had all seemed very romantic at first, when Bones had pitched it at him. Bones, it turned out, was New Resistance. The NR was a brotherhood, Bones said, a brotherhood that transcended race and nationality. And it could be a refuge, too. After the jailbreak, Jerome needed a home. He was on the run. And even internally, Jerome felt homeless and fugitive. Seeing himself in cybernetic summary, with unwanted objectivity; seeing his own shallowness.

I’ve been jerking off all this time with video graf, he told himself. I’ve been playing with the toys of the ego.

The New Resistance was in line with his own political convictions, his mistrust of the Grid, the power structure. Like Bones, he was convinced that the Second Alliance’s attempt to take over the US wasn’t isolated. He’d heard too many stories through the hacker networks about the repression overseas. Like Bones, he believed that the New-Soviets had been
pushed
into their aggression, forced into World War Three, by the economic machinations of the multinationals. Big Business had wanted a conventional military confrontation and now it wanted a Fascist power structure in order to further roll back the threat of communism. Jerome was no enthusiast for communism, but he understood its provenance: the people at the bottom of the pyramid were tired of holding up the ones at the top. They wanted a fair share.