A Song Called Youth (23 page)

“How do you know so much about this?” Kessler asked, unable to keep the edge of suspicion out of his voice.

“We get a case like yours once or twice a year. I did a lot of research on it. The ACLU has a small library on the subject. It really gets their goat. We didn’t win those cases, by the way; they’re tough to prove . . . ” He paused to sip his fizz, his eyes sparkling and dilated. Kessler was annoyed by Bascomb’s treating his case like a conversation piece.

“Let’s get back to what happened to me.”

“Okay, uh—so they made a request to the biological computer we call a brain, right? They asked it what it knew about whatever it was they wanted to take from you, and your brain automatically begins to think about it and sends signals to the cortex of the temporal lobes or to the hippocampus; they ‘ride’ the electrochemical signals back to the place where the information is stored. They use tracer molecules that attach themselves to the chemical signals. When they reach the hippocampus or the temporal lobes, the tracer molecules act as enzymes to command the brain to simply unravel that particular chemical code. They break it down on the molecular level. They extract some things connected to it, and the chain of ideas that led to it, but they don’t take so much they make you an idiot because they probably want your wife to cooperate and to stay with Worldtalk. You might not be close but she’s doesn’t need the guilt. Anyway, the brain chemistry is such that you can ask the brain a question with neurohumoral transmitter molecules, but you can’t imprint on the memory, in an orderly way. You can feed in experiences, things which seem to be happening now—you can even implant them ready-made so they crop up at a given stimulus—but you can’t feed in
ready-made memories.
Probably that’s ’cause memories are holographic, involving complexes of cell groups. Like you can pull a thread to unravel a coat fairly easily but you can’t ravel it back up so easily . . . Look at that exquisite creature over there, she’s lovely, isn’t she? Like to do some imprinting on her. I wonder if she’s real. Uh, anyway . . . You can’t put it back in. They take out, selectively, any memory of anything that might make you suspect they tampered with you, but lots of people begin to suspect anyway, because when they free associate over familiar pathways of the brain and then come to a gap—well, it’s jarring. But they can’t prove anything.”

“Okay, so maybe it can’t be put back by direct feed-in to the memory. But it could be relearned through ordinary induction. Reading.”

“Yeah. I guess it would be better than nothing. But you still have to find out who took it. Even if it turns up as someone else’s project—proves nothing. They could have come up with it the same way you did. And you should ask yourself this: Why did they take it? Was it simply for profit or was it for another reason? The bigger corporations have a network of agents. Their sole job is to search out people with development ideas that could be dangerous to the status quo. They try to extract the ideas from the guys before they are copyrighted or patented or published in papers or discussed in public. They take the idea from you, maybe plant some mental inhibitors to keep you from working your way back to it again. If you came up with an idea that was
really
dangerous to the status quo, Jimmy, they might go farther than a simple erasing next time. Because they play hardball. If you keep pushing to get it back, they just might arrange for you to turn up dead. Accidents happen.”

But riding the elevator up to his apartment, trying to come to terms with it, Kessler realized it wasn’t death that scared him. What chilled him was thinking about his wife.

Julie had waited till he’d slept. Had, perhaps, watched the clock on the bedside table. Had gotten out of bed at the appointed hour and padded to the door and ever-so-quietly opened it for the man carrying the black box . . . 

And she had done it simply because Worldtalk had asked her to. Worldtalk was her husband, her children, her parents. Perhaps most of all her dreadful parents.

And maybe in the long run what had happened to him, Kessler thought—as the elevator reached his floor—was that the Dissolve Depression had done its work on him. For decades the social structures that created nuclear families, that kept families whole and together, had eroded, had finally broken down completely. Broken homes made broken homes made broken homes. The big corporations, meanwhile, consumed the little ones, and, becoming then unmanageably big, looked for ways to stabilize themselves. They chose the proven success of the Japanese system: the corporation as an extension of the family. You inculcate your workers with a fanatic sense of loyalty and belonging. You personalize everything. And they go along with that—or lose their jobs. So maybe it started with the Dissolve Depression. Jobs were more precious than ever. Jobs were life. So you embraced the new corporation as home and family system. The breakdown of the traditional family structures reinforced the process. And you put your employer above your true family. You let its agents in to destroy your husband’s new career . . . 

And here we are, he thought, as he walked into the apartment.

There she is,
making us both a drink, so we can once more become cordial strangers sharing a convenient apartment and a convenient sex life.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?” she called from the bedroom.

He sat on the couch, holding his glass up beside his ear, shaking it just enough so he could listen to the tinkle of the ice cubes. The sound made him feel good and he wondered why. It made him visualize wind chimes of frosted glass . . . his mother’s wind chimes.
His mother standing on the front porch, smiling absently, watching him play, and now and then she would reach up and tinkle the wind chimes with her finger .
 . . He swallowed another tot of vodka to smear over the chalky scratch of loneliness.

“You really ought to get some sleep, Jimmy.” There was just a faint note of strain in her voice.

He was scared to go in there.

This is stupid, he thought. I don’t know for sure it was her. She hadn’t
exactly
admitted it. “That was just a hypothetical,” she’d said later.

He forced himself to put the glass down, to stand, to walk to the bedroom, to do it all as if he weren’t forcing himself through the membranes of his mistrust.

He stood in the doorway and looked at her for a moment. She was wearing her silk lingerie. She was lying with her back to him. He could see her face reflected in the window across from her. Her eyes were open wide. In them he saw determination and self-disgust, and then he knew she had contacted them, told them that he knew. And the strangers were going to do it to him again. They would come and take out more this time—his conversation with her about the money, his talk with Bascomb, his misgivings. They would take away the hush money they had paid him since he had shown he was unwilling to accept it without pushing to get back what he had lost . . . 

Go along with it, he told himself.

That would be the intelligent solution. Let them do it. Sweet nepenthe. The pain and the fear and the anger would go with the memories. And he would have his relationship with his wife back. Such as it was.

He thought about it for a moment. She turned to look at him.

“No,” he said finally. “No, we don’t have enough between us to make it worthwhile. No. Tell them I said next they’ll have to try and kill me.”

She stared at him. Then she lay back and looked at the ceiling.

He closed the bedroom door softly behind him and went to the closet for his coat.

They hadn’t taken the money yet. It was still there in his account. He had gone to an all-night credit kiosk, sealed himself in, and now he looked at the figure, $NB 760,000, and felt a kind of glow. He punched his fone and called Charlie Chesterton.

The screen asked him, “You want visual?”

“No.” he told it, “not yet.”

“Sap?” came Charlie’s voice. “Huzatun wushant?”

Wake Charlie out of a sound sleep, and he’d talk technicki.
What’s happenin’? Who’s that and what do you want?

“Talk standard with me, Charlie. It’s—”

“Hey, my neggo! Kessler, what’s happening, man! Hey, how come no visual?”

“I didn’t know what you were doing. I’m ever discreet.” He punched for visual and a small TV image of Charlie appeared below the fone’s keyboard. Charlie wore a triple-Mohawk, each fin a different color, each color significant; red in the middle for Technicki Radical Unionist; blue on the right for his profession, video tech; green on the left of his neighborhood, New Brooklyn—an artificial island. He grinned, showing front teeth imprinted with his initials in gold, another tacky technicki fad. And Charlie wore a picture T-shirt that showed a movie: Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis,
now moving through the flood scene.

“You went to sleep wearing your movie T-shirt, you oughta turn it off, wear out the batteries.”

“Recharges from sunlight,” Charlie said. “You call me to talk about my sleeping habits?”

“Need your help. Right now, I need the contact numbers for the Shanghai bank that takes transferals under anonymity . . . ”

“I told you, man, that’s like, the border of legality, and maybe over it. You understand that first, right?”

Kessler nodded.

“Okay, neggo. Fuck it. Set your screen to record . . . But for the record this is on you,
I
ain’t doing any such transferral . . . ”

Bascomb’s office was too warm; Bascomb had a problem with his circulation. The walls were a milky yellow that seemed to quicken the heat somehow. Bascomb sat behind the blond-wood desk, wearing a stenciled-on three-piece suit, smiling a smile of polite bafflement. Kessler sat across from him, feeling he was on some kind of treadmill, because Bascomb just kept saying, “I really am quite sure no such meeting took place between you and me, Kessler.” He chuckled. “I know the club very well, and I’m sure I’d remember if I’d been there that night. Haven’t been there for a month.”

“You weren’t enthusiastic about it, but you told me you’d take the case.” But the words were ashes in Kessler’s mouth. He knew what had happened, because there was not even the faintest trace of duplicity or nervousness on Bascomb’s face. Bascomb really didn’t remember. “So you won’t represent me on this?” Kessler went on.

“We really have no experience with brain tampering—”

“That’s funny, your saying that. Considering you obviously just had firsthand experience, pal.”

Naturally, Bascomb gave him that oh-no-don’t-tell-me-you’re-into-that-conspiracy-shit look.

Kessler went on: “And I could get the files that prove you have dealt with the issue in court. But they’d only . . . ” He shook his head. Despair was something he could smell and taste and feel, like acid rain. “They’d tamper with you again. Just to make their point.”

He walked out of the office, hurrying, thinking,
They’ll have the place under surveillance. But no one stopped him outside.

Charlie was off on one of his amateur analyses, and there was nothing Kessler could do, he had to listen, because Charlie was covering for him.

“ . . . I mean,” Charlie was saying, “now your average technicki speaks Standard English like an infant, am I right, and can’t read except command codes, and learned it all from vidteaching, and he’s trained to do this and that and to fix this and that, but he’s like, socially inhibited from rising in the ranks because the economic elite speaks standard real good and reads standard alphabet—”

“If they really want to, they can learn what they need to, like you did,” Kessler said irritably. He was standing at the window, looking out at the empty, glossy ceramic streets. The artificial island was a boro-annex of Brooklyn anchored in the harbor. It looked almost deserted at this hour. Everyone had either gone into the city, or home to TV, or to a tavern. The floating boros were notoriously dull. The compact flo-boro housing, squat and rounded off at the corners like a row of molars, stood in silence, a few windows glowing like computer monitors against the night.

But they could be watching me, Kessler thought.
A hundred ways they could be watching me and I’d see nothing.

He turned, stepped away from the window. Charlie was pacing, arms clasped behind him, head bent, playing the part of the young, boldly theorizing radical. “I mean, I’ve got some contacts on the space Colony, up on FirStep, and they’re getting into some radical shit there—and what is FirStep, man, it’s a microcosm of society’s class issues . . . ”

The apartment was crowded with irregular shelves of books and boxes of ancient compact disks; Charlie had hung a forest of silk scarves in the Three Colors, obscuring the details like multi-color smoke. “And in Europe—that shit’s getting
serious
—”

“Yeah, wars are serious, Charlie.”

“I don’t mean the fucking war, neggo. I mean the side effect.
Chegdou,
you know what’s happening in Europe, man? The SA is taking over! And it’s all being manufactured over here. Fascism, a fait accompli.”

Kessler groaned. “Fascism! Don’t give me that leftist catch-all cliché. It’s bullshit.”

“How can you say that after what’s happened to you?”

“What’s happened to me is business as usual. It’s not really political.”

“Business as usual is the very definition of politics in a world where corporate identity is more global every second. And anyway—you didn’t used to be so negative about this shit. Maybe they cut some of your political ideas, neggo. I mean: How do you know? You don’t remember—” He grinned. “Remember?”

Kessler shrugged. He felt like throwing in the towel, giving Worldtalk the fight. Maybe Julie was right.

“If you’d just talk to this guy I want you to talk to, man.”

“I don’t need any lectures from any more knee-jerk leftist theorists who’d probably give their right eye to be the rich and corrupt men they whine about.”

“You’re doing a devil’s-advocate thing now, Jimmy. You trying to talk yourself into giving up?”

Kessler shrugged.

Charlie looked at him, then went back to pacing, talking, pacing. “This guy I want you to meet—he’s not like that. He’s only in town a week. He’s not an armchair theorist. He’s not really a . . . what . . . I don’t think he’s a
leftist
exactly. I mean, he came here to get some financial support for the European resistance, and he had to run the blockade to do it, almost got his ass blown out of the water. His name’s Steinfeld, or that’s what he goes by, he used to be—what’s the matter?”