A Song Called Youth (92 page)

Washington, D.C.

Across an ocean, Smoke lay partly propped up in a hospital bed, feeding crusts to his crow. The crow sat on a perch in a square brass cage, the door of the cage wide open, on a table to Smoke’s left.

Beside the table was a cot, on which Alouette slept, curled up. She had insisted on sleeping in the same room with him, supposedly to keep him company. The TV was on, but Alouette could sleep through anything. It was because of her—because the nurses could deny her nothing—that the hospital had grudgingly allowed Smoke to keep the crow here, though the bird was supposed to be in the cage.

To the right of his narrow bed was a machine that fed him through a tube in his right arm. There was a bandaged hole in his chest, just under his sternum. A TV on the wall across from him chattered happily about peace negotiations. The New-Soviets. The new president. The disappearance of key American SA personnel. Not a word about the European SA. It was like the Iran/Contra hearings in the last century; then, too, the investigators had looked just so far and no farther. The Iran/Contra investigators ignored the evidence linking the president. It was now as it was then—as if they didn’t want to see certain things. Didn’t even want to think about them.

On Smoke’s lap was a clipboard and a letter he’d scrawled to Steinfeld. He wondered who he could trust to take it . . . so that Witcher wouldn’t intercept it. Witcher wouldn’t like the last paragraph:

I’m worried about Witcher. Did he ever give you his lecture on World Government and why it’s the next step? He has it all worked out, or so he thinks. He doesn’t like the SA
’s
notion of a world government. He prefers his own ideas. His personal vision of One World. He doesn’t even hint about his part in it. But I think we should both be worried about him.

Smoke tore the sheet off the clipboard and stared at it. Then he tore it into many small pieces and let them drift to the floor.

He sighed. He no longer ached all the time, no longer felt feverish. But he was tired. Needed to rest. After he got out of the hospital, there would be work. There would be no rest for the handful who felt the chill; who acknowledged the shadow of the Eclipse.

The Puerto Rican nurse came in and said, “You want me to turn off the TV? You look tired.”

“Yes please. I’ve lost the remote.” He closed his eyes and lay back. “Turn it off.”

The End of Book Two

A Song Called Youth
Book Three:
 
ECLIPSE CORONA

The author wishes to thank the following people for research assistance and other kinds of help, some of it difficult to define:

Corby Simpson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling,

Jude “St. Jude” Milhon, and Michelina Shirley

• • •

Blessed is the match consumed in

kindling flame

Blessed is the flame that burns in the

secret fastness of the heart

Blessed is the heart with strength to

stop its beating for honor’s sake

Blessed is the match consumed in

kindling flame

—Hanna Szenes,

Jewish Resistance fighter;

written the night before she was executed by Nazis.

• Prologue •

A tooth in a star.

It looked like a broken tooth; a molar broken off near the jaw. The shattered remains of the Arc de Triomphe in the center of L’Étoile, where the great avenues of Paris come together to form the arms of a star. Men in dirty orange worksuits labored in the Arc’s rubble, clearing, preparing, following the terse directions of the engineers and artisans operating out of the little aluminum trailers around the site. The laborers were men with sunken eyes, sallow skin, filthy beards, and the shaky movements of the malnourished. They worked under the unceasing watch of the mirror-helmeted soldiers in black cloth armor who stood guard over them. They worked as men thousands of years before had worked; as the slaves who’d moved stones for the pyramids had worked; as the Bronze Age men who had labored on Stonehenge: without gloves or cybernetic assistance. Hands bled on sharp edges of stone; knees bled from stumbling. There were two bulldozers, in another part of the site, for less delicate clearing, shuddering plastech machines that coughed and hummed. Around the worksite, guns gleamed in the dull sunlight. The Arc would be rebuilt. Or anyway, as one of the engineers had muttered, “A low-rez architectural scan.”

The Second Alliance—the twenty-first century’s neo-Fascists, operating under cover of a private international police force—had destroyed the Arc after Rickenharp and Yukio captured it for the New Resistance. An overzealous American SA commander with no comprehension of politics or French history had ordered the destruction of the Arc, that day, to get at the NR mice who’d hidden within its crown. To him the Arc was just a big heap of fancy stone used as a refuge for the enemy. That enemy’s bones had been found by the workers clearing debris, and tossed in the small-rubble bin.

The truth had been transmitted to the rest of the world through the Grid, the international media network; especially through that part of the Grid called the Internet, with its social media. But now there was an information blackout in SA-held Europe. The French knew what the neo-Fascists told them: The Second Alliance claimed that so-called New Resistance Terrorists had destroyed the Arc de Triomphe. The French mourned the monument, but few asked questions. The destruction was just more of the prevailing madness of the Third World War. There were just too many questions; the answers were one more thing being rationed to the survivors . . . 

The Third World War had not been a nuclear war. After a Central Committee coup by KGB hard-liners ended what had been begun by
perestroika
and
glasnost,
the New-Soviets and NATO had squared off over Western Europe. But the New-Soviets lacked the technology and the infrastructure to win; fortunately they also lacked the will—or the irrationality—to choose the nuclear option.

The internal tumult brought on by a war going badly drove the New-Soviet hard-liners into hiding. Under a new Party leadership, the New-Soviet Republic retreated—and surrendered. But not unconditionally. Their vast nuclear arsenal precluded any unconditional surrender. They still remained in control of the NSR and some of the Warsaw Pact countries—though they had lost Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. They agreed to pay reparations and to open their borders. Their society slid into a ferment of upheaval as reformists with a strong base of military support jockeyed for power.

Nuclear war had been sidestepped. But the conventional war had been devastating enough. And the crypto-Fascists, in the guise of an international police force in place “to keep order” in the chaos behind the lines, had seized the moment. Had put their puppets in place, contrived the illusion of a nationalist movement in a squirming handful of European states; had taken control of France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Greece; were seizing the reins in Britain and Germany. “A wave of nationalism sweeping Europe, strangely similar, from nation to nation, in its ideological foundation,” one American observer had said. Observers were few in media-darkened Europe, and those few were not permitted to see the pogroms, the European apartheid, the rounding up of Jews and Asians and the dark races; of anyone vocally outraged by the new ghettoism, the new “processing centers.”

The Second Alliance’s power had foundered in the United States, for the most part, thanks to Jack Brendan Smoke, and other NR activists. But it had consolidated in Europe; was consolidating further, now, through the wonders of technology . . . and psychology. And it was for psychological reasons that the new French Fascists had given priority to reconstructing the Arc.

The Arc de Triomphe was a monument to the ego of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the embodiment of his power; of the strength of his armies. A concretization of megalomania. On pretext, it was built to honor the French army; in reality, it stood for the ambitions of the man who’d directed that army to conquer Europe. Who had sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths as a sacrifice to his vanity. The Arc was begun in 1806; not completed until 1836. A hundred and sixty-four feet high, a hundred and forty-eight broad, more massive than any other European monument of the time; both florid and martial in its design, like a pompous architectural Goliath wearing both his armor and an effete, intricately embroidered cloak.

It was the symbol of French military might and that made it the symbolic backbone of nationalism; it was irrefutably masculine, structured as solidly as an empire.

There was an irony. It had been, for a while, also the symbol of the New Resistance; an outline of the Arc sewn on the NR flag. But that flag had been rarely seen, and the Fascists had again taken the initiative, retaken the symbol, like land retaken in a battle, co-opted it and, in a way, inverted it for their own use.

The New Resistance would find another symbol. It was about to raise a new banner, a banner neither red nor black, and certainly not the white of surrender. The flag was simply blue. The blue of an open sky.

• 01 •

Paris, France. June. Deep into the twenty-first century.

Dan Torrence knew the look; knew how to wear it. A walk that conserved energy; a hunching over, just a little, with hunger. Not stumbling or belly-gripping but sheltering the hollowness in your stomach, and the weak fire that still burned there, as if you were trying to protect it from going out in the thin rain of this lusterless spring day. It was the camouflage he adopted as he moved slowly but stolidly around the edges of the crowd filling the Place de l’HÔtel de Ville.

He’d seen the look often enough in the last few months; could now simulate it effortlessly. Here it was repeated in the crowd like an expressionist’s motif: the distorted posture, the gaunt faces, the pasty skin, the expressions of deep waiting on pallid faces.

He glanced with studied disinterest at the high, ochre insta-mold and raw-wood stage newly set up on the other side of the square, festooned with banners in the colors of the French flag; colors gone dull under the lifeless, aluminum-gray sky. The clouds shrugged out a little rain, and a fitful wind made Torrence hunch deeper into his green plastic slicker. Suddenly, the Marseillaise blared and echoed around the square, pumped from stage speakers as, behind the podium, French soldiers, every one of them Caucasian, in full dress replete with berets, tugged white ropes, to ceremoniously raise an enormous French flag as backdrop for the stage. The flag drooped like a man with a bent back until, pulled taut, it snapped into display as if the man straightened to bare his chest. The crowd reacted with a smattering of applause and a shudder of skeptical muttering. Everyone quietly aware of the forty Second Alliance bulls, the men in soft armor and mirrored helmets, carrying rifles and Recoil Reversal sticks, standing at parade rest, in formation, to either side of the stage . . . They were part of the array, as well as protection for the new president of France . . . 

The flag blocked out a large section of the HÔtel de Ville—the City Hall of Paris, in its latest incarnation. Built first in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; burned by the Commune in outrage against the excesses of Napoleon III in the nineteenth century, rebuilt in a foggy imitation of Boccador’s somewhat extravagant wedding-cake conception, looking now Victorian and called by the French an example of
Belle Époque.
The Second Alliance had chosen it for this event, Torrence supposed, because it was one of the few intact government buildings left in Paris.

The square had been the Place de Grève until 1830; a place of celebrations and official functions, which sometimes combined when there was an execution. In this square, so Levassier said, Ravaillac, the man who’d assassinated Henry IV, had his dagger hand burned off; his torso torn open with sharp tongs, and the wounds filled with boiling oil. Then, while he still lived, his body was pulled asunder by horses . . . And in this
Place,
other criminals, and supposed criminals, had been “broken on the wheel,” their bones crushed by an executioner wielding a heavy bar; others were simply hung or axed or guillotined, events reliably attended by great crowds of the rich and the poor, enjoying the spectacle.

The spectacle had arisen again, like a ghost who returns on lunar cycles. But today there would be no executions.
Except perhaps one execution,
Torrence thought:
Truth,
Smoke would probably say,
will be guillotined here today.

They raised the instrument of that particular execution: a television monitor big as a movie screen, humming upright on the back of the sound truck parked to the left on the stage. On it, almost immediately, was an image of the Arc de Triomphe, unfurling in pixels like an electronic flag.

Daniel Torrence, whose
nom de guerre
had been Hard-Eyes, looked at the scene through the shutters of apparently hunger-blurred eyes, seeming to see only the podium, the flag, the image of the erstwhile Arc: the symbols. Some other observer behind the shutters of his eyes saw the blank boxes set up to one side of the stage: holographic-shading projectors camouflaged as sound equipment.

And, without looking directly at them, he saw that Danco and Lina Pasolini and Charles Cordenne, looking as drab and inconspicuous as Torrence, were in position in the crowd. They stood at points diametrical to him, facing the stage.

The guards slid the paper-thin antiprojectile styrene into place in front of the stage now; stuff so thin and transparent and glare-resistant you couldn’t see it from most angles. It would stop bullets; it wouldn’t stop the interference projector hidden under Torrence’s rain slicker.