A Song Called Youth by John Shirley Page A

shoulders, carrying drinks in plastic cups.
    The “street” of white synthetics was nine yards wide, and dingy; the ceiling, three yards overhead—unusually high for a Colony corridor—was blue, fluffy clouds painted on at intervals. The clouds looked as if they ought to be laundered with bleach.
    Molt’s gaze wandered down the street, where the crowd thickened at the one Admin-sanctioned casino. He considered going up for blackjack. But no one in the casino was permitted to lose more than ten newbux in cred, nor win more than twenty, and there was no way, in Molt’s view, you could work up a good gambler’s sweat when the stakes were so low.
    The other clubs and cafés were articulated in bright, brassy, circus-rococo colors, neon-trimmed and flashing, but it was all Admin operated; and to Molt it looked like a miniature setup for children, like the department store “Santa Claus Lane” of his boyhood.
    “See the fucking elves making toys,” he muttered. Even the Strip’s pornography parlor was watered-down, the porn softcore and revoltingly well photographed. Tasteful. Not much fun at all.
    He lit a syntharette, not because he wanted one, but because this was one of the few areas in the Colony where the nico-vapor was permitted. And because there was nothing else to do. Just nothing else to fucking do.
    Molt was a heavy man with a brickish complexion and sharp blue eyes and a tousle of rusty hair. He leaned both elbows on the plastic table, his cup of three percent beer between his hands. He wore genuine faded Levi’s, and a real-wool knit pullover, dull yellow, holes at the elbows and shoulder seams. Bonham—a sad-eyed man with thinning brown hair, a long nose—wore a gray pilot’s uniform without insignia, two-piece, the short jacket taut across his wide, flat chest. He wasn’t a pilot, which is why the uniform had no insignia. The uniform was supposed to help him pick up women. Like Molt, Bonham was a pilot’s second, which officially made both men Technic Union. Both had two years of college and, socially, both looked down on technickis. But both men were Neo-Marxists and in the political abstract regarded the technickis as brethren workers.
    Bonham had a way of fading in and out of conversations like a radio with a faulty frequency modulator. He could be dreamy and then diamond-hard analytical, by quick turns. He leaned back in his chair, one hand toying with an empty glass, his mind somewhere else.
    “Bonham,” Molt said, leaning forward, lowering his voice meaningfully. “Fuck these tourists. You want to go to that club they got in the Open?”
    Bonham stared glassily at a smudged cloud on the ceiling.
    “Joe, dammit!” Molt said sharply.
    Bonham snapped his eyes down from the cloud. “Yeah, I heard you. Japanese tourists. Pain in the ass.”
    “I asked, You wanna go to the club in the Open?”
    “The Tavern on the Green? Out in the Admin’s Open? You know what that place costs? Three bux for a cup of tea.”
    “Yeah? It’s just—I never been there. But now that you mention it—I can’t feature those prices. Forget it.”
    “Of course, the cost is one way they keep it exclusive, keep the technics and the maintens out. I say we spend the money and make ourselves seen there. A Statement, man.”
    “Isn’t worth the price.”
    “It would be for the principle of the thing.”
    “I can’t afford the principles. And I’m on probation. If you get drunk, start making speeches, you’ll get us into shit with Security.” He shook his head dolefully. “Hey, Joe—those new Security bulls they got are mean. Fuck it, let’s wait for the Afters. You can get something that’ll get you drunk, lose some real money, get yourself sick like a man ought to be able to.”
    Bonham nodded. “Something in that.”
    The talk and the place were ordinary, and that felt all right: they were between duty-pulls, they had a week, and they could amble through everything and the week wouldn’t have to go as