A Song Called Youth (27 page)

Because he had spent his youth fighting a sense of unreality; a feeling of insignificance and transience. Partly it was the Grid, the outgrowth of the Internet, the spawn of the mating of television and the Web. It shaped the prevailing iconography, the backdrop Hard-Eyes had grown up in, middle-class urban America. As it shaped London, Paris before the war, Tokyo, New Delhi, Capetown, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong . . . As it had been tincturing Russia, yes, even the People’s Republic of China for decades. Steinfeld thought that the Grid was, perhaps on some collective unconscious level, the real reason the Neo-Communists in Russia had begun their post-Glasnost aggression. After the fall of capitalist post-Putin Russia, and the shambles of the new global recession, Russia had descended into near anarchy, giving the new authoritarian state the mandate to re-establish Communism. The new Soviet needed to pirate resources by conquest to stabilize its power. But it feared the Grid: The satellite transmissions blanketing the Earth with every frequency of the Grid. They tried to impose a Soviet-like censorship but Russia was pervaded with illegal satsend receivers; the black market in them boomed uncontrollably.

Hard-Eyes understood their fear of the Grid very well.

The minimono star Callais becomes hot. Overnight his image is everywhere. Endorsing in videos, holos; dancing, singing with charming minimono lugubriousness on animated T-shirts, and in playback glasses and on holo-posters and on screens in cars and buses and trains and planes and singing out of the radio . . . Or someone pushes a new style of clothing computer-designed for a computer-evaluated subtype: Westerclothes for the Distinctively Rough-Edged Man.
He’s a Westerclothes Man!
 . . . Political candidates packaged like a candy bar, like a line of clothing or a cigarette, while the politician’s actual political reality almost entirely undefinable . . . 

Worldtalk with its glassine fingers in the news broadcasts, the printouts. Shaping, shading the data: Illusionists in the pay of special interests. There was, once, an American Underground—but one was never sure who the real enemy was. Who, finally, was responsible for the Dissolve Depression and the rooftop shacktowns it created; the increasing blasé acceptance of the USA as a nation under siege from within, manning the barricades with the growing legions of hired cops, gypsy cops, rent-a-cops, uniformed thugs insulating the rich from the poor?

The Grid shaded it all beyond clear seeing. War-support propaganda. Styles of talking popularized by characters from TV shows. Catchy expressions deliberately created by TV-show packagers. Media-propagated intellectual fads, health fads, and art fads. Fads on fads within fads—gushed out from the great cornucopia of the Grid. The latest celebrity scandal—and sometimes the celebrity didn’t exist as a physical person. Some were, all along, purely digital creations.

All of it transient, the day-by-day changing shape of the national self-image. Each man reduced to the status of a single pixel in a wifi transmission.

And now, in that split-instant, in a flash insight into his personal mental cosmos, Hard-Eyes knew why he was going to stay and why he would fight beside Steinfeld.

Because this . . .

. . . the SA cops in their beetle-wing helmets using their clubs, the confrontation with the true predator; with a clearly distinguishable evil.

. . . this was
real.

Bonham was standing in line, staring at the plastic-sheathed metal wall. The pilots called the Colony’s walls “bulkheads,” and the irritated Colonists had called the pilots “bulkhead blockheads”; now with the blockade they were “blockade bulkhead blockheads.” To Bonham, it was a wall, and when he’d worked on the spaceships’ shuttles the ship’s “bulkheads” were walls, to him. He didn’t like NASA jargon, he didn’t like working for NASA, and he made up his mind he wasn’t going to work out-Colony anymore. They didn’t pay him for those kinds of risks. The Russians might take the next step, go from blockading to shooting ships out of space, and no way Bonham was going to put his ass on the line for a handful of newbux once a month.

One part of Bonham’s mind was tracking angry free association; the next level down was watching the line of people waiting to get into the main shop and thinking,
There’ll be nothing but crap left by the time I get in there. There has to be a way to get in sooner.

He looked over his shoulder, spotted Caradine and Kalafi in the line down the hall behind him. He made the hand sign that said,
I’m going to initiate a resistance action, are you with me?

Caradine and Kalafi signaled support. They were acknowledging his leadership and that felt good.

So Bonham took a deep breath, stepped out of line, and walked to the turnstile, ignoring the frowning clerk. He turned and looked down the line and shouted, “You want to know the truth about what’s going on here, people? They’re using the blockade as an excuse to hoard supplies! Admin gets all the supplies they need! The only way we’re going to get what we need is
to take what we want!
”

They looked back at him with fear and uncertainty. But the cooling system was only intermittently functioning again and they’d been waiting there an hour and a half and the line was moving like a dying centipede and all they wanted was goddamn toilet paper and their protein-base ration and their rabbit meat ration and maybe some frozen orange juice . . . 

So when Kalafi and Caradine joined him—and the three of them broke the line, pushed past the clerk at the turnstile, began the looting—the whole damn line followed their example. Bonham felt a surge of adrenaline-fueled pleasure in being at the cutting edge of the riot.

The rioters were whooping and cackling and feverishly scooping and grabbing, sweeping armfuls of groceries into their carts and bags, running out past the checker when they had all they could carry, kicking tables of cans over just for the hell of seeing them fly and clatter, terrifying the regular security guard—an old man in a uniform.

But some part of Bonham’s mind wondered where Molt was, and listened for the amplified voices of Security bulls.

So he left the shop as soon as his cart was full, just as the good stuff was beginning to run out and the crowd was losing its mischievous-kid holiday mood and beginning to get genuinely surly. Bonham shoved the choicest of his groceries in a box, picked it up, and ran for it, not thirty seconds before Security got there. The cameras swiveled to watch him go.

“It’s sad that you never knew Paris,” Besson was saying.

They were sitting beside the window in a café in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, Hard-Eyes and Jenkins and Besson. Besson made Hard-Eyes think of Baudelaire; he had the bulbous head, that forgotten hairline; the hurt, accusing eyes; the bitter mouth; and the threadbare dandyism. He wore an old-fashioned vested sharkskin suit and a bow tie; a gold-plated watch chain looped over his thin middle. Besson had sold the watch itself, a year before, when the Russians had the city sealed off and the first famines came. His shoes were taped three times, all the way round, and he’d put blacking on the tape to try and make it took like part of the shoe. His vest was missing three buttons, and he was unshaven. His nails showed negative quarter-moons of black. But he was elegant; still, he was elegant.

He smoked the wretched C-rations cigarette down till it burned his yellowed fingers. He sighed, crimped it carefully out, and put the eighth-inch butt in a Prince Albert tin he kept in a jacket pocket. “The bastard Yankee soldiers gave me one cigarette. Not even a chocolate bar. I’m not pretty enough, eh?” He gave a mirthless laugh. As if on cue, a truckful of American soldiers trundled noisily down the street. The truck ran on compressed hydrate crystals; the septic smell of methane trailed the truck as it swung, grinding as it changed gears, around the corner.

“Most of the Americans will be gone tomorrow,” Besson said, and there was no regret in his voice.

Jenkins and Hard-Eyes looked at one another. Hard-Eyes shrugged.

Jenkins had tried to talk Hard-Eyes into surrendering to the American soldiers, pretending they were just lost American expatriates. More than once they’d thought about it, in Amsterdam. But the Americans didn’t send you home, word had it. They press-ganged you into civilian work crews. Or, worse, the COs had the power to draft you on the spot.

“You have never seen Paris,” Besson said mournfully. He gestured contemptuously at the tired, wounded city around him. The café faced a narrow, brick-paved street below the Sacré Coeur. The onion dome of the ancient cathedral was just visible above the red tile rooftops; the overcast sky was breaking up in the late-afternoon breeze. Propaganda leaflets whipped down the gutter. The tall, stately buildings, narrow houses crowded together in gray stone and red tile, windows shattered out of them, were gap-eyed, lifeless. Most of the chimneys were mute, spoke no smoke; the sidewalks were scabbed with trash, a neglect unknown to Paris before the war. The café itself was almost empty. There were no supplies—it sold no beer, no liquor, only weak tea and a few exorbitant bad wines. The big copper espresso pumps were empty; Parisians were complaining as much from the loss of their daily caffeine as from the famine. The café owner kept the establishment open mostly out of habit. There were two old digital pinball machines against the wall, dead, cold as tombstones; there was no power. But the newly arrived SA technicians had gotten the natural-gas pumps working. There was gas, to heat the tea Hard-Eyes and Jenkins and Besson sipped beside their fly-specked window.

“This café, now, at this hour, should be overflowing with people,” Besson said. “In the next room, they would fill their salad plates and eat, and the waitress would come to tell them the daily carte . . . They would have wine, and café after, a fine black café. Les Halles! I lived in Les Halles, I had a bookstore. I knew your Steinfeld very well in those days. He would come in, and we would argue . . . ” There was a flash of genuine pleasure in Besson’s eyes for a moment. “How I loved to argue with him! Wonderful arguments! We both enjoyed! And Les Halles—the tourists were the life of the place, and there were musicians and jugglers to take money from the tourists. The French musicians would try to sing American songs, the Americans stranded in Paris would try to sing French Songs. Or Paris on a rainy night—you walk on the streets almost empty, and then you are filled with the romance of your misery. Just when you are cursing the rain, you see the glow of a
brasserie,
the light laughing out of it. There was a bread seller, Prochaine. He was said to make a wonderful bread, and the reputation of this bread was such that people would stand in line two hours to buy it, to buy one loaf, sold only in his shop. It was a heavy bread, not dark and not light, a little sour but also sweet, and it was moist . . . crystalline.
Comprends?
A very simple bread, and profound,
mes amis.
You could taste one bite for an hour. This
pain-Prochaine,
it was Paris. Just five years ago, my friends . . . Prochaine is dead now, and his son is dead, and when the Russians held the city, the Allies bombed a big gun in Les Halles, antiaircraft gun, and now the neighborhood is . . . ” He shrugged and sipped his tea.

“And now the SA is here,” Jenkins said.

Across the street, a man was putting up a poster. He peeled the backing-paper off and pressed it onto the big gray stone wall, beside the wide stone stairs terracing up to the cathedral.

The posterer was a knobby teenage boy in a ratty sweatshirt. His hair was twisted up into a flare topknot over his head, in imitation of last year’s American fashions; but the tint was six months overdue for renewal; and he’d had to hold the shape with rubber bands.

Besson sighed. “Why do you Americans send us your stupid hairstyles?”

Hard-Eyes was laboriously translating the poster. It came out as something like:

THE
FRONT NATIONAL
HAS COME TO THE RESCUE OF THE FRENCH PEOPLE!! WATCH FOR THE SOLDIERS OF THE
STRATEGIE ACTUEL
AND STRUGGLE BESIDE THEM TO REBUILD PARIS!! THE
STRATEGIE ACTUEL
HAS RESTORED THE GAS!! FIGHT THE CONSPIRACY OF FOREIGNERS!!!!!!!!!!!!

The boy continued down the block, peeling the backing off the posters, sticking them up, leaving the slick brown backing to curl like oversized pencil shavings on the cracked sidewalk. He put up three more posters, each one different, and yet each one the same as the last.

The second said: “WHY HAVE WE ALLOWED THE ZIONISTS TO RAPE PARIS?”—and nothing more.

The third said: “PARIS IS A JAIL AND THE FOREIGNERS ARE THE JAILERS . . . BUT FRANCE HOLDS THE KEY!!

A fourth said: “FOOD AND FREEDOM IS ON THE WAY! DON’T LET MUSLIMS, JEWS, OR LIARS TAKE IT FROM YOU!

Each poster was printed on a different color paper, with different styles of lettering. They were not of uniform size. They might almost have been put up by different organizations.

“When the electricity comes on, they’ll start the radio propaganda,” Jenkins said.

Besson snorted. “How? The Russians blew up the power plants.”

Jenkins said, “Saw something out at Rond Point Victor Hugo. They had a receiver on a truck. A microwave power receiver. Maybe SA owns one of the power gathering satellites. Maybe they’ll beam it down here. Not enough for a whole city—but enough for, say, a fifth of the town, two days a week. The people’ll be glad for what they get. They’ll know who to thank . . . ”

“And the SA can cut it off when they want. When it suits their purposes,” Hard-Eyes said.

“This talk disgust me!” Besson declared, flapping his hand dismissively. “You disappoint me. You are talking politics. I thought you were men of refinement. Do you think it was politics that made our situation? No, my friends. It was aggression. Politics is only the snorting of the bull before the charge. But—I can see that Steinfeld has chosen you well.”

Hard-Eyes looked sharply at him.

Besson laughed. “I said the right thing, no? This bastard Steinfeld, he chooses men he knows will catch the disease of politics! The secret idealist, eh? Someone—Jean François—said to me, ‘Why should I work with Steinfeld? He is a foreigner pretending to fight for France. There are Yanks and Brits in his troops. Maybe they are CIA, maybe British secret service . . . Why should they fight for us?’ But I told him to remember the German resistance to the Nazis in World War Two. Not so much resistance, but it was there! The resistance against the Nazis was every kind of man, in Germany. There were Communists and conservatives and everything between. There were foreigners and there were fanatic German nationalists who simply hated Hitler.”