A Song Called Youth by John Shirley

the place looked like the paradise it had been designed to be. But then the vent-breeze shifted and she caught the soiled-socks odor of the dorms’ overworked air recycler. And the paradise was gone. Paradise has always been fragile.
    “Japanese tourists,” Samson Molt said, “never change. The Japanese keep their traditions. Their tea rituals. Their sushi schools and their chopsticks and that Japanese packaging. And the way they act in foreign places is always the same. Since I was a boy, they never changed. They’re faddish in some ways—but really, they never change. Could almost be the same tour group I saw in New York as a lad.”
    Samson Molt and Joe Bonham were lounging at an “outdoor table” at the south end of the arcade. The six clubs, two digital arcades, a handful of boutiques, and two cafés were “the Strip,” which was the closest thing the Colony had to authorized nightlife. Molt and Bonham preferred the unauthorized nightlife. But that didn’t start for hours yet, end of the third shift, when the maximum number of B-section workers would be freed up to spend cred.
    The tourists were eight nearly identical (to Molt’s eyes) Japanese with the faddish forehead-strapped cameras, each camera with its remote focuser that snapped down over the right eye, transforming the socket into something reptilian. They wore onepiece Japanese Action Suits, JAS for short, in tastefully splashy pastels, soft material. They chattered and pointed, winking to make the headband cams take pictures. Each stop along the arcade was an orgy of you-take-my-picture-and-I’ll-take-yours, posing in front of everything, so that half of what they were photographing was blocked by their bodies.
    Molt wondered which ones were industrial spies. The Japanese were said to be planning their own space colony.
    Their guide was a tall, demure black woman making a valiant effort to look interested as she droned, “ . . . the Colony took twenty-four years to achieve basic livability for non-astronaut personnel . . . ” drone “ . . . begun in secret early in this century . . . Richard Branson was an . . . ” drone “ . . . now owned by UNIC, the United Nations Industrial Council, five major international corporations who pooled their resources for matching funds from the UN . . . ” drone “ . . . The Colony manufactures goods which can only be made in zero or light gravity, as well as operating the first of a chain of interplanetary solar power stations which soak up solar energy and transform it to microwaves transmitted to receptors in the Gobi and Mojave deserts . . . ” drone “Although UNIC is still operating in the red, it expects to break even next year and to begin a profit-making phase in the following year . . . We begin our tour at the arcade because it links Tourist Arrival with Colony Open, the parkland area which as you will see in just a moment verges on the paradisial in its . . . ” Drone.
    The tourists clicked and snapped and chattered on, and the Strip was itself again, shorn of the kitschy glamor of their enthusiasm. Like most of the Colony corridor areas, the Strip seemed more worn, more used, more frayed and grimy than things on Earth, though it had been built only a few years before. Which surprised visitors. They expected the pristine polish of a top-tech chips clinic. But the Colony was almost a closed system. And replacing anything, repainting anything, was more costly here . . . 
    And now the Strip was like a third-generation hand-me-down toy in a grubby nursery, its colors faded or smeared with the grease of too much touching; like a seaside amusement park long since gone to seed.
    Across from the French-style Café Crème was the white seashell-shaped metal awning of the Captain Halfgee club. Soft, moving lights glowed behind the mermaids painted on its plastex windows; two customers came out, still dripping chlorinated water, towels draped over their