A Song Called Youth (58 page)

Torrence looked out the window. The last shreds of saffron light were melting away. A single ray of orange-red flicked on as a cloud shifted at the horizon. And suddenly switched off, as the sun sank farther, as if someone had thrown a switch to turn off a searchlight beam.

Steinfeld said, “I have in mind a large, concerted raid, timed to hit the island when they’re having their conference. Ideally we will kill Watson and some other top people, destroy their sat dishes, their transmitters, whatever aircraft are on the ground. It won’t stop their push, but it will slow them. The longer they wait to put SPOES into effect, the more chance we will have to warn people about what’s coming.”

Chiswell said, “Rather awfully breezy, the way you say it, Steinfeld—but that island will be defended like nowhere else in their territory. I don’t think we have the manpower or the air power to make it work. Unless the Maltese help us.”

Steinfeld said, “They’re Socialist, so they oppose the SA. But not actively—not even very vocally. They give us shelter, but no help with materiel or troops or transportation. The Mossad will provide some planes, some choppers, some amphibious vehicles. But it must operate secretively too. There’s a severe limit to how much they can help us. Witcher is doing what he can, but he’s finding it tough to get anything through the Atlantic Blockade.”

“Then we do what we can with what we’ve got,” Torrence said, thinking, as the room grew darker still.
And we’ll probably die doing it.

A young black woman came into the room; Lila, an NR captain from Martinique. She spoke to Steinfeld in rapid-fire French. He nodded, replied in the same language. She left. Steinfeld said, “It seems Levassier is going to live. He will lose an arm, however.” Cold silence till he went on. “And one other piece of news: Michael Karakos has escaped from the detention camps. He’s on his way to us. He’s a good man. He’ll be a great help.”

And the darkness in the room was almost complete.

• 04 •

There was a can of people, floating in space. It was the Space Colony, FirStep, but to Russell Parker, just then, it was only a very big tin can.

Russ Parker—he thought of himself as Russ—was Chief of Colony Security. He sat at his desk in Central Admin, hating his job, hating his current home (if you could call it a home), hating his boss, and hating himself. And asking God’s forgiveness for all that hatred.

It had just hit him as he sat there looking over his schedule of interviews for the day:
He hated.
It had boiled up in him from somewhere hidden and it had come as a complete surprise.

A bit of scripture popped into his head, Romans 12:20. . .
 . if your enemies are hungry, feed them . . . 

But, Russ added to himself, try not to feed them your soul.

Russ was six-foot-two, weighed in at two twenty-five. He wore an Admin sky-blue Security jumpsuit—the color of the original security force’s uniforms, before the SA—and an old-fashioned wristwatch with a watch face and hands. He was middle-aged but boyish-looking, blue-eyed, tanned, seam-faced, and he usually managed a friendly expression. He sat in a compact office, twenty feet by thirty, with the claustrophobic seven and a half feet between floor and ceiling, typical of the Space Colony’s offices; the walls were postered with old
Arizona Highways
photos of the American Southwest’s deserts and mesas and sunsets. His desk was real walnut—he’d built it himself, having imported the wood over a six-month period a piece at a time—and centered on it was a white plastic computer console.

He wished to God you could smoke on the Colony. Even after all these years . . . 

Russ took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, leaned back in his squeaking swivel chair—he refused to let them oil it, he liked it to squeak—and put his booted feet on the desktop.

He’d just come from his session with Dr. Tate, the Admin chief psychiatrist. Had gone to him about his ulcers, which his physician felt were stress-related. Tate seemed to’ve had a partial rejuv, had his face and back rebuilt, so he looked thirty years younger than his sixty-five—and Russ himself was fifty but Tate seemed paternal somehow, anyway. He’d expertly gotten Russ to talk about himself. Airing the misgivings he’d been having about the job, and how the job conflicted with his religion.

Prompted by Tate, Russ realized that only part of the hatred was real. The part about hating
himself.
The rest of his feelings about the job, the place, were colored and exaggerated by his self-hatred. Russ Parker was a Christian, and his self-hatred, as Tate had hinted, was rooted in the shame of religious hypocrisy.

That thought came to him while he was looking at the list of names on the computer screen.

Beside the name of each Security Risk he was to interview was a short summary of the interviewee. Ninety percent of them were either black, Jewish, or married to a black or Jewish person. The other ten percent were Marxists or known to be associated in some way with the people who’d fomented the Technicki Rebellion. The list just didn’t make sense—there was no particular correlation between the technicki rebels and race. Only thirty percent of them had been members of a racial minority group. And those weren’t the ringleaders. The issues giving rise to the Technicki Rebellion just weren’t race-related.

The Colony’s new chief administrator was a man named Praeger. The list had been made up by Praeger’s special committee on post-rebellion security measures. And everyone on the committee was, like Praeger, an SA Initiate.

Russ took a deep breath, turned in his swivel chair, and tapped the button that would buzz Administration for video conference. He glanced at his watch. It was three p.m., Colony Time. Praeger should be back from lunch by now.

Praeger’s cybercam image appeared on the upper left-hand screen of the four monitors, two stacked over two, that stood to the left of Russ’s work console. Praeger said, “Hello, Russ, what can I do for you?” Wearing his rimless Coke-bottle glasses, running a hand over his eraser-pink bald head, making an inquisitive cone of his prissy red lips.

Russ controlled his surge of revulsion and said, “Well, now, Bill, I was just looking over the list of Risks, and I just can’t see why most of them are on there. I feel it’s inappropriate to use race as . . . um . . . ”

“Everyone on the list is there for a good reason,” Praeger said briskly, as if he were impatient with stating the obvious. “The reason doesn’t necessarily show up on the stats attached to the list. Sometimes the reason isn’t provided. Our agents just give us the names, and there are too many names for them to get specific about each one. We want you to interview them and see what you can find out. Look for connections to rebels of course—but, really, anything problematic at all.”

Russ struggled to maintain his mask of serenity. Like nothing rattled him. Objecting mildly, “That doesn’t make sense, either. They know I’m Security Chief. I expect they’re not likely to open up to me. No, sir. And, hell—I don’t know what I’m supposed to be lookin’ for. ”

“Don’t you?” A hint of real annoyance in Praeger’s flat voice now. “Saboteurs, for a start. Who sabotaged the food refrigeration? Who’s been interfering with InterColony TV transmissions? Who’s been freezing up Admin’s elevators?”

“Probably just servicing breakdowns, Bill. We haven’t got the parts—”

“Some of those systems were newly installed.”

“There was no direct evidence that it was sabotage, the way I heard it.”

“Electronics informs me that they think it was done with a power surge, which was deliberately introduced into the systems.”

“I’ve got that report. I see it as a lot of wild digging for excuses to cover up the fact that they can’t find the real problem.”

“They might as well say that the statement you just made is
your
way of covering up
your
inability to find the saboteurs.”

There was a tense silence. Then Praeger chuckled, to let Russ know that what he’d just said wasn’t serious. But they both knew it hadn’t been entirely a joke, either.

Behind that chuckle was the slightly veiled implication that Russ’s job might be on the line.

Sure, Russ had come to despise the job. But he was trapped on the Colony till the blockade was lifted. If he resigned, he’d be an object of suspicion. He’d be on the list that was on his computer. He just might be arrested on general principle.

“Maybe you don’t know, Russ—there’ve been reports of unusual activity at Life Support Central,” Praeger said.

“I’ve got that one. Wild changes in power output levels. You think it’s connected to the power surges in the other parts of the Colony?”

“I don’t know. But I want you to see what you can find out about a kind of technicki cult around Professor Rimpler.”

“A what? A
cult
?”

Rimpler? Rimpler was dead. Bludgeoned by Samson Molt during the uprising. Rimpler, who’d founded the Colony, had turned against its Admin Committee, had become a rebel sympathizer.

Praeger shrugged. “For people who work every day with state-of-the-art hardware, the technickis are remarkably superstitious. Evidently some of them believe Rimpler’s spirit is haunting the Colony. It could be that this cult around his ‘spirit’ has found out about his, ah, cerebral/cybernetic interface . . . which is now in place in Life Support Central.”

“Run that ’un by me again there, boss, will ya? About that interface?” Drawling it, making light of it. But Russ was stunned.

Praeger sniffed. “It’s not so unusual. Been done before. When we found his body, it wasn’t quite brain-dead. He was interested in cerebral/cyber interfacing, he had all the equipment here to experiment in it . . . and the life-support computer system was on its last legs. We didn’t have time to get in a new life-support computer—we can’t get in the equipment fast enough with the blockade. The air was getting bad. It’s that simple. We risked a total breakdown in life-support systems without some kind of guidance computer. A brain interface was the quickest way—the only way we had. The principle of cerebral interfacing . . . ”

“I understand the principle.” Human brains store much more information than a computer in a
much
smaller space, and they respond to some things more quickly; brains could be grown, or surgically removed, from people who’ve signed their bodies over. Once perfected, using an interfaced human brain as an extension of a computer costs less than an elaborate computer storage system. “But, Bill . . . ” He shook his head again, laughed hollowly. “It’s all experimental! And, anyway, it’ll never be practical for the Colony’s
life support!
We discussed this, and the committee voted against it! Brain tissue is too fragile; it deteriorates, ages, has a number of unpredictable qualities . . . and—for God’s sake!—you used
Rimpler’s
brain? I mean—Rimpler?”

“As for its deteriorating—the wetware link is only a temporary expedient till we get a hardware system. We’re keeping the tissues alive with a nutritive fluid. It’s fascinating, really, don’t you think? Just being able to access all the right parts of the brain to use . . . remarkable. Admittedly, it’s an experiment that, ah,
interests
me . . . ”

Russ suspected that Praeger took some kind of perverse pleasure in using his old adversary’s brain tissue as a convenient spare part. It was like a medieval ruler making the skin of his enemy into a seat covering for his chair, or drinking ale from his skull. It was a celebration of his complete triumph over him.

Praeger,
Russ thought
, you’re a sick man.

Praeger went on. “And as for its being
Rimpler’s
brain—this isn’t a Gothic by Mary Shelley, Parker. Do you suppose we sent Igor out for a good brain and he dropped it, came back with Rimpler’s? There’s no shred of Rimpler’s personality left in it. We have a primitive extractor here . . . not adequate for interrogation, but it
will
erase. Rimpler’s memories were erased. A great deal of the brain was cut away; we’re only using the tissue that’s interfaceable. Dr. Tate used electrochemical amino-acid breakdowns to translate the computer’s impulses into neurohumoral transmission units which . . . ”

“
Dr. Tate
did this?” Russ broke in, startled.

“Yes.” Praeger’s expression was as glassy and flat as the TV screen. “Why?”

“Uh—nothing.” So Praeger was working closely with Tate. How much had Tate told him about Russ’s problems? Did he stick to professional confidentiality?
Was Tate SA?

“It could be some of our Security Risks know about Rimpler’s brain,” Praeger said. “There could be a connection.”

“Seems pretty farfetched to me. And interrogating people in this arbitrary kinda way . . . To be honest, I don’t think excessive security is
good
security. It makes people angry at authority, makes them hard to deal with—we could end up
making
rebels. I just don’t see the necessity.”

“You don’t see the necessity.” Praeger’s voice was terribly calm. He reached for something offscreen, punched some buttons. An image appeared on the lower right-hand TV monitor . . . 

It was a telescopic TV image of a spacecraft; something like a standard space shuttle but knobbier, with heavily bolted plates, and generally cruder: a New-Soviet vessel. Their spacecraft always looked directly descended from the
Monitor
and the
Merrimac.

“You see that?” Praeger asked.

“I see it.”

“They’re out there. The New-Soviets. Less than a hundred kilometers from our outer hull. Directly in the way of the approaches to our hangars. They’re armed. They have—you see the dishes?—a great variety of communications gear. They could be communicating with someone on the Colony, for all we know. They could even have had accomplices at the air locks.”

Russ listened with amazement to the rising tone of hysteria in Praeger’s voice. Praeger looked cool, but . . . he’d begun talking rapidly, and his pitch had risen half an octave.

“I see,” Russ said slowly. Soothingly. (Thinking,
This man is making life-and-death decisions about people . . . about me . . . he’s capable of having me killed.
) “Well, uh, I surely see your point and, ah, that puts a different light on things.” Adding humbly, “I’ll get right on it, Bill.”