A Song Called Youth (56 page)

Was there a way to drive a wedge between the two men? Karakos wondered.

You’re grasping at straws, he told himself.

But Karakos; had the habit of hope. It was a survival skill, for the “detainees.” A monstrously false term,
detainees.
As if it was only temporary. As if they’d ever go free.

“As you can see, Jean-Michel,” Watson began, “the detainees in the three pens are divided, roughly, into three skin-color groups.” Watson’s manner, talking to Karakos, was amiable, respectful, with a touch of the paternal. Just as if he wasn’t a prisoner wearing handcuffs and guarded by a giant professional thug in a mirrorglass helmet. Watson went on, “And, in fact, each of the three pens is on a different dietary regimen. The black-skinned group in number ten are fed rather well and given a number of privileges, such as cigarettes, the others don’t receive. The brown-skinned group in eleven is on an average diet, with average privileges. The lighter-skinned coloreds—half-breeds, essentially—in pen twelve are being nearly starved. Dr. Cooper’s theory holds that interracial mistrust is
instinctive,
but that instinct is often dormant until survival-stress factors are significantly increased. You’ll note the subjects are in most cases imprisoned, in this experiment, with their families, in order to tap into their protective instincts. Each penned group has been informed that fighting is to be severely punished—the equivalent of the civilizing social inhibitions that check violence in urban settings—but Dr. Cooper believes that given a sufficient increase in survival-stress factors, all such restraints will be overwhelmed and aggression will take place.”

“People who starve get angry, yes,” Karakos said. “And they’ll strike out against whoever’s around. Race has nothing to do with it.”

“We have another group, on the other side of Control, in pens thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen,” Cooper said, in an oozily patronizing tone. “In those pens the races are mixed: light-skinned side by side with black and so forth—and we find that they do not respond to survival factors nearly so uniformly as those who are incarcerated with their own race.”

“Even if it’s true,” Karakos said, shrugging, “it doesn’t prove anything about the superiority or inferiority of races involved.”

“We have other experiments . . . ” Cooper began a little angrily.

But Watson cut him off with an incisive hand motion. “It’s of no real relevance in the long run, which race, if any, is the superior. First you must understand that this experiment is laying the groundwork for experiments on a larger scale in the outside world. We can induce race war with the right social pressures applied . . . ”

“
Colonel . . . ”
Cooper said warningly.

A flicker of satisfaction showed on Watson’s face.
He’s using me to bait Cooper,
Karakos thought.

Watson went on blithely. “The question of race superiority is only of academic interest—to me, at any rate. What matters is that races are inherently programmed to be in conflict with one another, under any sort of real stress—and the only true path to world peace is to see to it that the conflict is resolved by carrying it to its logical conclusion; its final solution . . . ”

Karakos shook his head in disbelief. “I always assumed that you wanted to, ah . . . ”

“To enslave?” Watson smiled. “Or perhaps merely to exploit the other races?” He chuckled. “It’s no longer practical. There’s too much uncontrolled information polluting their cultural integrity, poisoning them with discontent and ambition. No, in the long run the only real solution is genocide.
Many
genocides. Oh, for now we need the lesser races for economic reasons. But we’re already at work breeding a sub-race of workers who’ll be quite incapable of challenging us. We call them ‘subjugate breeds.’ The subjugates won’t be human at all, you see. No smarter than dogs or horses, but they’ll be idiots savants when it comes to carrying out whatever low work need be done—technicki work, grunt work.”

Cooper was fuming. Even the silent SA guard behind Karakos was shifting restlessly. In a carefully flat tone Cooper said, “Colonel, you have a tendency to enjoy the sound of your own discourse to the detriment of security . . . ” Watson silenced Cooper with a look. It wasn’t a hard look, particularly. Once more, it was incisive. “When I speak to Karakos, I’m speaking to a blackboard.”

Karakos knew what he meant. He meant the extractor. He meant he would be
erased.

They’d already put him under the extractor once, for interrogation purposes. But they hadn’t gotten anything useful: The resistance had shifted its headquarters since he’d been imprisoned. All the partisans he’d known about had long since fled France. He had no idea where Steinfeld and the others were now.

But next time the SA would erase him, would take not only his personality, his convictions, but also everything he knew that might be useful to the Resistance. And now he knew something that could make all the difference. If the rest of the world could be told . . . 

Karakos felt sick with responsibility. He had to get word out somehow. Because Watson was not insane. He was probably a sociopath, yes, but not truly insane. It seemed impractical: a plan to exterminate every race on Earth but the Caucasian—and the Caucasian’s special “subjugate breeds.” Wildly impractical.

But maybe not. The Second Alliance’s New Life Lab was known to be involved in genetic engineering of microorganisms. And during the Middle Ages a single strain of microorganism, the bubonic plague, wiped out something from one third to one half of the population of the world. Indiscriminately, of course. But suppose someone engineered a discriminatory virus or bacterium? Some had claimed that the CIA, in the twentieth century, had come close to developing a germ that killed only Slavic races . . . like the New-Soviets. But the project had been canceled as impractical because too many Americans had Slavic blood.

But suppose the SA developed genes that were more selective. That killed only the black race, the Jewish race, the Chinese.

“But what would you do about the New-Soviets?” Karakos asked.

“The New-Soviets will lose the war,” Watson said. “We’ll absorb them. Racially they’re close enough to us that . . . ”

“Colonel Watson,” Cooper interjected, student now, “suppose something were to go wrong—an attack on this building, say—and this man were by chance to go free? He—”

“He’ll be taken care of very soon, I assure you, Cooper,” Watson said sharply. Losing patience. Dropping Cooper’s
doctor
honorific.

Karakos thought,
They’re off-balance with conflict now. Try it.
“I understand your multiple genocide is even now being cooked up in the New Life Labs.” Deadpan. Trying to sound as if he knew it to be true.

Watson and Cooper were staring at him. Watson had gone almost as white as Cooper. He began, “We extracted you, you had nothing about . . . ” But then he snorted and shook his head ruefully. “You are playing a little game with me.” His bluegray eyes had seemed watery; the water turned to ice now, as he stared at Karakos. He’d been wheedled into an admission. He’d been manipulated, and it was as if Karakos had spat a wad of phlegm onto Watson’s ego. Watson went on. “You shouldn’t play at such things, you know. I have you, you see. I
own
you now. I can do as I like with you. And I really don’t think you’ve quite considered the implications of that.”

Karakos’s stomach lurched.

“I brought you here,” Watson said, “to prepare the ground for you in some way. Or to prepare the ground
in
you. The extractor will change you, yes. We will erase you, rebuild you from the ground up—but simply chemically installing a new mind-set in a man doesn’t seem adequate to me. I felt you needed to be prepared. I feel that somewhere in you there’s a seed of genetic purity that resonates with the beauty of what’s happening here—a beauty that emerges from truth.”

“You’re preparing me . . . mystically?”

“Spiritually, perhaps.” Some of the edge had left Watson. “I . . . always felt you were rather wasted on the other side. I suppose I wanted to try to convert you the ordinary way first.” He shrugged. “Strange impulses arise in one from time to time.” He looked down at the pens. “Ah. The fourth stage. Have a look, Karakos.”

Karakos forced himself to look. Till now, afraid of his own anger, he’d tried not to look at the pens too closely. Now, he saw the prisoners squatting in groups, held nearly motionless by the weight of misery. Saw that the privileged detainees had clothing; the others were humiliated by being kept naked and shivering with cold. Saw them huddled for warmth and rocking on their heels, mothers clasping listless infants. Some of the younger men seemed to have gone into the gray blankness of simple despair; others were looking around with a maddening repetitiveness: Look first this way, see the fence, the locked gate, the guards, the wire; look
that
way, see another fence, wire, guards; look another way, see the wall, the opaque window behind which they knew more of their captors watched them; turn, look behind, and see the fence, the guards, the walls. Start over again: see the fence, the locked gate, the guards, the wire . . . No matter how many times you looked, it was still the same.

Even from here, Karakos could see the marks of malnutrition on the unprivileged prisoners; the distended bellies, the sores, the dullness in their faces. But all of them, from time to time, glared sullenly at the other pens.

The gate opened, four SA guards strolled into the non-privileged pens, picked out prisoners at random, and began to beat them. “And, of course,” Karakos said, his voice just a croak now, “those in the privileged pens are not usually beaten.”

The prisoners were cringing, running, clawing at one another to get out of the way as the guards swung cattle prods and Recoil Reversal sticks.

“You begin to see,” Cooper remarked, “how very animalistic the prisoners are. They revert so easily.”

“Animalistic?” Karakos could not believe it. He fought himself, feeling the dull throb of hatred inflame and squirt searing bile in him. He wanted to lunge at Cooper.

But he didn’t move. It was as if he stood balanced on the tip of a flagpole. He didn’t dare to move. He simply stood at the window, trembling, sweat running into his eyes, as Cooper spoke into a microphone, ordering the guards; and as the guards opened the gates between the pens.

As pens eleven and twelve were opened onto number ten.

The guards withdrew from the area. None could be seen from the pens.

Slowly the larger group, made up of the prisoners in eleven and twelve, began to move toward the frightened, huddled blacks in ten.

It began gradually. But in ten minutes the fighting had begun, and in fifteen minutes four, perhaps five, of the blacks had been beaten to death by the prisoners from the other cages.

Karakos was choking, gagging. Not with squeamishness—he was beyond that—but with undirected rage at the way these people had been shorn of their humanity, twisted into new shapes; all the hunched shapes of brutality.

“I think we have room forty-four set up for Jean-Michel, don’t we?” Watson said, speaking into a fone he’d taken from his belt. “Good.”

I have to make them kill me,
Karakos thought. Or they’re going to use me and I’ll be part of this.

This—the men tearing other men to pieces below. And women. And children.

He could no longer contain himself. He slipped from the flagpole, turned toward the guard, and, forgetting his cuffs, tried to raise his fists against the man and screamed in frustration when the shackles restrained him—and something bit him on the arm. He looked, saw that Cooper had given him an injection. He had time to think,
They’re going to use me.
And to feel the horror that followed on that thought, before all thinking was eclipsed and the darkness was complete.

Washington, D.C.

“So what did Unger say?” Howie asked.

Stoner shrugged. “Not much—just something ambiguous about how things are ‘hopping’ and ‘we’re all gonna have to watch our step, you read me, Kimosabe?’ ”

Howie laughed.

The two CIA career men were in a bar in Washington, D.C., on Connecticut Avenue. It was not a fashionable bar. It had a twentieth century jukebox, its music the umpteenth reissue of Patsy Cline or George Jones, twentieth-century country music instead of Minimono or chaotics or ska-thud or angst rock. The floor was wood instead of concrete or plastipress, and it sagged in places with age. The bar stools weren’t confoam; they were torn, taped-up vinyl. There was a mirror behind the bar instead of a vidflasher.

Howie and Stoner were sitting in a scarred wooden booth drinking Lone Star beer, imported from Texas, and talking shop. They were almost the only people in the bar, except for a barfly on a stool at the far end talking to the bleached blond barmaid, and a snoring fat man four booths away. It was eight p.m., and Stoner was tired from work—but at the same time he was wired on a nagging anxiety that never quite articulated itself.

Howie was a barrel-chested black man of fifty, wearing halfglasses and four gold rings on his left hand. An enormous white cowboy hat was tilted back on his head—he’d worn it as a joke, because Stoner was a country-music fan. Howie’s right eye was electronic, an implant; it moved a little differently than the other, but it was fairly realistic. They’d even traced fake veins on the corner of the white. When you looked at the iris closely, you could see the overlapping sections of its shutter closing.

“Unger came into AD this morning,” Howie said. Once a field agent, Howie now worked in the CIA Domestic’s Accounting and Disbursements office. “Said he had a special project needed funding and the director was unavailable, could he talk to our supervisor? What the hell, he thinks Fench is going to give him money without top-off approval? Man’s crazy.” There was something more than office-gossipy derision in Howie’s voice; something personal, even sullen.

“All he wanted from me—in a material way—was the Kupperbind file,” Stoner said, watching Howie’s face.