A Song Called Youth Read online

  A SONG CALLED YOUTH:

  ECLIPSE

  ECLIPSE PENUMBRA

  ECLIPSE CORONA

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  Copyright © 2012 by John Shirley.

  Cover art by Paul Morley.

  Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-346-4 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-330-3 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

  Table of Contents

  Introduction by Richard Kadrey

  Biographical Note on the Author by Bruce Sterling

  Eclipse

  Eclipse Penumbra

  Eclipse Corona

  About the Author

  • An Introduction •

  Richard Kadrey

  There’s an old saw that SF is really about dissecting the present and not about looking at the future, and that’s true as far as it goes. Sometimes though, SF can’t help but lift the future’s skirts for a peek underneath. Look at 1984 and its description of a Total Surveillance society. Brave New World’s look at genetic engineering. Star Trek practically engineered modern smart phones. Hell, both H.G. Wells’ “The World Set Free” and Superman described atomic bombs. John Shirley’s A Song Called Youth trilogy—the novels Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona—is another piece of SF that spray-painted a glimpse of the future on the cave wall without knowing it.

  We’re living at a strange moment in history. “Interesting times,” as the Chinese call it in their famously charming curse. We want power to make our TVs glow and medicine to save our decaying asses but we hate smart people. We whine about Arab oil but go NIMBY when it comes to large-scale alternative energy projects. We want the government to stay the hell out of our lives but we want it to ban gay marriage and porn and to keep that witch-loving Harry Potter from dragging our kids to the devil through the school library. We want reassurance and safety at all cost and we’ll suck down snake oil from any carny with a good pitch.

  John Shirley saw over the horizon to the post-9/11 fear and loathing idiotscape where the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and government itself have become mere formalities. Where for-rent mercenaries guard us as long as the money flows and where our desperate need for a strong leader makes the shit sandwich of fascism look a little tastier every day.

  And he did it twenty years ago.-

  The A Song Called Youth trilogy is the story of the world we’re knee deep in. And like the best rock and roll it kicks down the walls and busts up the furniture when the action starts and makes you think when you slow down long enough to listen to the words. Living in stupid times doesn’t mean you have to be stupid. And maybe with some cunning, crazy-ass energy and balls maybe you can turn things around and make the world a little less stupid. A little less dangerous. A little less suicidal. Hell, that’s pretty much what life is and it’s what A Song Called Youth is about.

  —November 2011

  • Biographical Note on John Shirley •

  Bruce Sterling

  “I first met him in 1977 when he was into spiked dog collars. No one else was ready for his insane novels . . . there just wasn’t anything else like that being written then—no hook or label like cyberpunk, no opening—so they were totally ignored. If those books were published now, people would be saying: ‘Wow, look at this stuff! It’s beyond cyberpunk!’”

  —William Gibson

  I knew this guy John Shirley when he was the first and only punk science fiction writer in the world.

  Back in those days, William Gibson was a hobbyist teaching-assistant who was whiling away his youth, in his ivied meditative fashion, in Canadian junk shops. I was an engineer’s kid from a smoggy refinery town who had had my head utterly twisted by three years in India and was hanging out with cowboy-hatted interstellar longhairs deep in the heart of Texas. Rudy Rucker was futilely trying to pass as a normal math professor somewhere in upstate New York. Lewis Shiner was enamored of hardboiled detective fiction and living in Dallas.

  But John Shirley loomed on the horizon like some prescient comet. The rest of us paid a lot of attention to him. We were right to do this.

  Most of the science fiction writers who later got called “cyberpunks” are and were, at heart, really nice middle-class white guys. They have some pretty strange ideas, but in their private lives they dress and act like industrial design professors. John Shirley was a total bottle-of-dirt screaming dogcollar yahoo.

  There were still a few New Wave people around at the time earnestly writing stories with hippie protagonists. The people in John Shirley’s stories weren’t hippies. They weren’t progressive. They didn’t mean well. People in John Shirley stories were canaille. They had no brakes. They didn’t know what brakes were.

  Other people wrote experimental stories with numbered paragraphs, but John Shirley wrote “stories” that were so profoundly fucked-up narratively that you could feel the guy’s fingertips trembling spastically on the keyboard. Some of the more daring SF writers of the period were testing the limits of genre. For John Shirley the limits of genre were vague apparitions somewhere in his rearview mirror.

  Science fiction is a genre by and for bright people who feel a tad ill at ease in a bourgeois society, a tad under-socialized, but also a tad inventive. . . . Nice people, really. You get used to them. They have a lot to offer, these insect-eating Mensa-freak people who like making puns about neutrinos while sipping ginger ale in the con suite. John Shirley was never like that. John Shirley in his early days was visibly orthogonal to the human species.

  I share certain deep and lasting commonalities with John Shirley. We’re very near the same age and we’ve shared some crucial generational experiences. Harlan Ellison was a guru of mine and was kind enough to commission and publish my first novel. Harlan Ellison was utterly enraged with John Shirley and once publicly challenged him to a duel. I once angrily walked out on a bad panel at a science fiction convention. John Shirley liked to topple over tables at science fiction conventions and wallow howling in the crushed ice where the fans had hidden the beer. I listened to a lot of punk music. John Shirley wrote, recorded, and performed punk music.

  I think that drugs are an intriguing social and technomedical phenomenon. John Shirley had serious drug habits. I got married and had a kid. John Shirley has been married four or five times and has three kids by two different women. I’ve written over a dozen books. John Shirley has written more books than I can count, a lot of them under pseudonyms. I once wrote a book with William Gibson. John Shirley is the guy who convinced William Gibson that writing science fiction was a good idea.

  I’m kind of interested in military stuff. John Shirley joined the Coast Guard. I took some martial arts classes. John Shirley had a beer bottle broken over his head in a bar brawl. I’ve moved house a few times in the last thirty years. John Shirley’s moved a couple of dozen times during the same period, including a sojourn in France.

  The typical Bruce Sterling fan is a computer-science major in some Midwestern technical university. “Stelarc” is a John Shirey fan. Stelarc is an Austalian performance artist who has an artificial third hand, sometimes bounces lasers off his eyeballs, and used to suspend his naked body in midair by piercing his flesh with meathooks.

  It may be that it all boils down to this; I am a professional science fiction writer who happened to get called a “cyberpunk.” John Shirley is a uniquely authentic avatar of the weltanschauung.

&nbsp
; —Adapted from “Foreword” by Bruce Sterling

  in The Exploded Heart by John Shirley

  A Song Called Youth

  Book One:

  ECLIPSE

  For my sons, Byron and Perry and Julian, in the hope that I’m wrong about the world they will grow up in.

  • • •

  AN IMPORTANT NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  This is not a post-holocaust novel.

  Nor is this a novel about nuclear war.

  It may well be that this is a pre-holocaust novel.

  • Prologue •

  There was a small bird made out of titanium and glass. It had mechanical wings, electronic guts, and its head was a camera. But it was shaped much like a thrush and was about the same size. Its wings whiffed like a hummingbird’s as it flew through the damp, battered city . . . The city was Amsterdam.

  In the winter of the year 2039, Amsterdam was occupied by the NATO forces which had, for the moment, succeeded in driving out the armies of Greater Russia, the shock troops of the neo-Com dictator, Koziski . . .

  Global warming. Climate change. It had radically reduced the output of Russian agriculture—of the availability of fresh-grown food, and stock feed, in many places—and that meant food had become hard to get. The Russians were on the edge of starvation—some of them over the edge—when Koziski had decided that Russian armies would swarm into Eastern Europe, and keep on going, in order to corral food resources . . .

  So far, it was a world war that hadn’t gone nuclear.

  On the belly of the bird were serial numbers. The bird was a surveillance device, registered with the United Nations Intelligence Regulation Agency. Anyone punching the right serial numbers into a computer modem’d to UNIRA, along with the proper clearance codes, would be informed that the bird was licensed to British Naval Intelligence, under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  The battery-powered bird had been activated on a British aircraft carrier twenty miles off the crumbling coast of Holland, at the request of the officer in charge of Civilian Law Enforcement. CLE was working out of an apartment building in one of the drier suburbs of half-sunken Amsterdam. The deserted building had been occupied by NATO Forces’ Dutch Command Unit as a temporary headquarters.

  The CLE officer was an American from Buffalo, New York. His name was Yates. Captain Yates had a memo on his desk from the Second Alliance International Security Corporation (the SAISC, or SA for short) asserting that the SA’s supply lines had been “repeatedly disrupted” by the “civilian gang calling itself the New Resistance.” The SA memo pointed out that it had been authorized by the Hague—those members of the States-General whom NATO had been able to contact—and by the UN Security Council, to police Amsterdam and the surrounding areas. The Second Alliance would see to it that the civilian population remained orderly, as well as safe from looters and other lawbreakers. To do that (the SA response memo went on peevishly), the SA had to move into Amsterdam, and it could not move the rest of its men in unless there were supplies in Amsterdam to sustain them. “I hardly need point out,” the memo continued, “that while the SAISC is a civilian private-police force, it must nevertheless work in close cooperation with the NATO military forces, and cooperation is a two-edged sword.” Yates frowned, reading that part. Cooperation as a sword? “The terrorist gang known as the New Resistance,” the memo shrilled, “is a danger to the NATO armies as much as the SA inasmuch as it commonly steals supplies from NATO forces and disseminates antimilitary tracts which irrationally lump NATO and the Russian forces together as if both were the aggressors in the area.”

  Yates had shrugged and sent the communiqué to the nearest NATO ship with surveillance equipment, the Lady Di.

  And the bird had been set free.

  But not free to fly about at random. It flew in a widening spiral pattern through the civilian areas, looking and listening for gatherings of “four or more civilians.” There weren’t many people left in Amsterdam, so the job wasn’t as time-consuming as it might seem. When the bird found gatherings of four or more civilians (not very often) it attached itself to the outer wall of the building in which the gathering was taking place, and it laid an egg. The “egg” was actually a tiny hemisphere of nanomaterials that clung to brick or concrete or glass or plasteel and sent out minute sensors. The sensors picked up the heartbeats of people, and if there were enough heartbeats close together, it transmitted a signal. Under martial law it was illegal for more than three persons to gather together without supervision, except in designated areas. The designated areas were under even closer surveillance.

  The commander of The Netherlands unit made the gathering-size rule as there had been some trouble with what he described as “low-grade terrorist conspiracies.”

  Yates, having dispatched the birds to watch for illegal meetings, dispatched another communiqué to the SAISC, telling them what he’d done. Soothing them.

  The SA, receiving the message, communicated with their contacts in the USAF Jumpjet Reconnaisance Unit. SA sympathizers in Jumpjet Recon were given the frequency specifics of the transmitting “eggs,” and were urgently requested “in the spirit of cooperation,” to “triangulate these terrorist cabals and do what is necessary to put them out of business.”

  The bird flew from one block to another, mile after mile, occasionally attaching eggs. After the third time, it flew past a certain high-rise, where it startled a real bird, a crow, which had been restlessly circling the building.

  The crow was shaken by this close encounter with a “UFO” and took itself to the nearest terrace railing to recuperate. It settled onto the railing, looked around, and saw with relief that the bird with the metal wings and a glass head had flown away.

  But someone else was there, at the other end of the terrace.

  Part One:

  SMOKE

  • 01 •

  “This city is dead.” He said it out loud, to a crow. The big black crow was perched on the concrete railing that ran mostly intact around the rubbled terrace. They were thirty stories above the flooded street, where dusk darkened the floodwater to indigo.

  The crow heard, tilted a glare at him. Smoke went on, “This city is dead, and I’m someone. I’m still someone. Being here hasn’t helped.” He spoke to the crow and to the clammy, acidic breeze—it smelled like a ruptured car battery—that lifted the edges of the rain-caked stack of printouts some looter had tossed onto the terrace. “I’m still Smoke, Jack Brendan Smoke, or Brendan Jack Smoke or Smoke Jack Brendan. Mix it up the way you want, it’s still there. I thought it would leach off here, crow. Like . . . ” He paused, not sure if he was speaking aloud or thinking it now, and wondering which it was. He shrugged and went on, “Like you have a pan of water, nothing else, just dead flat calm water, and you pour, say, a little ink into it, and the ink spreads out, gets all diluted, in a few days, you can’t see it anymore. But it didn’t work. The ink is still there. I’m still Smoke . . . I could leave Amsterdam, crow. I might not be Jack Smoke where there’s enough people. Lost in a crowd. I could go to Paris. There’re still a lot of people in Paris.”

  The crow’s claws made a skittering sound as it shifted on its perch. Shifted a little closer to him.

  It occurred to Smoke that the crow might not be real; might be a cybernetic fake. But he was past caring.

  Smoke put his hands on the railing, felt the concrete’s cold bite his palms. He looked at his hands. They seemed creatures apart from him: clawlike gray things, with horny, overgrown yellow nails. He looked that way, all of him: clawlike, gaunt, dark with grime, his layers of scavenged shirts and jackets and pants gone all raggedy edged and uniformly dirt-colored, so he looked like a crow himself, in molting. He had long, matted black hair and beard, and a bird’s bright black eyes and an eagle-beak nose. He chuckled softly, thinking that perhaps the crow had mistaken him for one of its own . . .

  “It’d be better to be a crow,” Smoke said. He looked away from his hands, out over the railing at t
he city—the necropolis.

  This section of Amsterdam was relatively intact, as if mummified, and that amplified the absence of human movement; as if someone had thrown a switch that simply turned off the people the way you’d switch off a hologram: click . . . zip, they’re gone.

  Smoke tried to visualize Amsterdam the way it had been just five years ago: The streets feverish with cars and buses, most of them self-driving and electric; traffic pulsing on the bridges of the “city of one thousand and one bridges”; flat barges gliding on the Amstel and on sedate, tree-shaded canals flowing slow and thick as green candle wax. It was a city built in rings of streets and canals, most of the architecture remaining as it had been, gabled and red-bricked, when it was built in the seventeenth century. The city had permitted only a few high-rises, in certain zones, like the shell Smoke and the crow perched in now. Now, and all was the same as five minutes ago except it was just a dilute ink-wash darker. There was no going back in time. There was only going forward, one second at a time, as things fell apart.

  The clammy wind soughed like an ache through the concrete corridors; the flood made a hollow whush like the sea heard in a seashell.

  The overcast sky was a lowering ceiling of smudged charcoal black on charcoal gray; the upper reaches of the high-rise faded into cloud, as if the building became less real as it went up and was entirely imaginary at its peak.

  Smoke leaned over the balcony and looked down. The floodwaters filling the avenue were sinuous with current, moving, tugging the yellow blob of Smoke’s rubber raft tied up at the second-story window ledge. The water was rising. Perhaps the Zaider Zee would return, to reclaim Holland.

  “Oh, you could say the city was still alive,” Smoke said to the crow. It must have been aloud, because the crow fluttered its wings in response. “Because there are still people in it, on the higher ground, squatting here and there. Maybe a few thousand, maybe a few hundred. That’s life, but it’s the life in a corpse—micro-organisms that live on after the host has died. Hair that grows though the skull is empty. And the SA will be here soon. So the corpse’ll be maggoty. And, you could say, ‘Maggots are alive.’ ”