A Song Called Youth by John Shirley Read Free Book Online

were brown-black. Her eyebrows were a trifle too thick to be feminine. But the whole, as an ensemble, was far more attractive than she knew . . . Her petiteness and girlish features deceived people into expecting docility. “The truth is, Claire’s pure Admin,” her brother Terry had said of her. “Gives orders as naturally as a technicki gives back-talk.” Her father had lectured Terry about making “classist” remarks about technickis.
    No, she’d never been docile. But there were times she’d been passive, introspective, before her brother’s death—before Terry had been snuffed into a statistic, in the Third EVA Disaster. Her brother had been supervising a technicki hull-team in the construction of section D, the Earth-end of the cylinder, two years before. An EVA pod had come too close to a tethered satellite. One of the pod’s landing struts had snapped the comsat’s tether, so the satellite tumbled into the extra-vehicular team on D-sec, striking two, who spun to hit two more, a weightless domino effect that in turn spun thirty-one men off into space, most of them with ruptured suits. Only one of them was recovered alive. Six bodies were never recovered at all. In the wake of the disaster—and with the ongoing problem of the Colony’s costs outweighing its financial benefits—public pressure on UNIC had almost cut off funding. Claire’s father tried to resign as Colony Committee Chairman and Design Supervisor. New funding had come from select UNIC members, certain big corporate investors, like the Second Alliance. The SA . . . Rimpler had been persuaded to return to work . . . 
    But her dad was never the same. He wouldn’t look out the ports, into space. Maybe he was afraid he’d see Terry floating out there. Floating up to the glass. Staring accusingly.
    And Claire was different after that. The occasional moods of passivity vanished forever. She blamed Admin laxity for Terry’s death. Which meant she had to become Admin, to set things right. And she was Admin now. Almost completely.
    Claire had explained to the children why the land overhead wasn’t going to fall on them, and how if they walked in a straight line to arbitrary east they’d eventually come back to the spot they’d left, arriving from the west, all in the same day if one walked fast enough. The children were patient through all this, except, of course, for Anthony, who ostentatiously smoked a syntharette through it all, expecting her to rebuke him for inhaling nicotine vapor, frustrated when she pointedly would not play that game.
    They ate a lunch of pressed fruit, from produce grown in the Colony’s agripods, and soybutter ’n’ jelly sandwiches. And when they’d finished, Claire said, “We’re going to have to go back soon. So if anybody has any more questions . . . ?”
    Chloe raised one of her small black hands and asked, “Whunna finzuhruzat?” She pointed to the arbitrary north, the inner part of the sphere away from the sun. The land here, between the meager areas of finished developments, looked calico, brown and yellow in patches, with outcroppings of raw blue metal.
    “First of all,” Claire reminded her, “ask the question in Standard English. Technickinglish isn’t what you’re here to learn.”
    Chloe sighed and said, laboriously, “When . . . they are—”
    “When are they.”
    The little girl made a moue of frustration and went on, “When are they going to . . . finish the . . . rest . . . of zuh—no— of that ?”
    “Good! To answer your question, the Colony is about two-thirds finished. Maybe five years more and it’ll be done.”
    “But who’s going to live in the new part when it’s finished?” Anthony asked abruptly, showing off his command of Standard English.
    She’d been expecting the question. And she could feel their attention had shifted, suddenly, from whispered jokes, giggling, teasing, complaining—shifted to her. Now, now they were