Free A Song Called Youth by John Shirley Page A

in, setting up here. Wait, and you’ll see it confirmed. And remember: I’m not a leftist. Here we’re in favor of restoring only what existed before the war. Yes, the bad with the good. We are not revolutionaries. We are resistance—to what is shaping up to be a neo-fascist takeover. Spearheaded by the SAISC.”
    “Why you going to so much trouble to convince us?” Jenkins asked.
    “I need . . . ” Steinfeld hesitated, looking for the right words. “There are men who are like seeding crystals. You drop them into the solution, and other crystals form around them. I need such men. To form the . . . the core of a much stronger resistance cell. And Smoke here”—Steinfeld gestured helplessly—“he has an uncanny sense for finding such people. He found Voortoven, and Yukio. And he has recommended you.” Steinfeld shrugged.
    “I’m not sure I should be flattered,” Hard-Eyes said.
    Steinfeld said, “Do you want to hear the rest of the . . . propaganda?”
    “Go ahead.”
    When a man tells another man a story, much of the story is untold. That is, it’s not told out loud. The unspoken part is the freight of secondary meanings and resonances attached to the spoken thrust of the story. It’s a part of the story already understood by the two men. Part of their mutual context.
    What follows is what Steinfeld told Hard-Eyes. And here we speak aloud what wasn’t spoken at all.
    Smiling Rick Crandall. He was one of the youngest Fundamentalist ministers in the country. By the time he was twenty he had his own internationally syndicated program. He was exporting Christian Coalition beliefs and values to the rest of the world, and he was succeeding because he, and his associates, kept tying it in with wealth. Decline or not, America still had the rep for being the wealthiest country. And Crandall kept saying it was his religion and his way of life that made it that way. Predinger bought the station that ran Crandall’s show, tripled the man’s salary, and gave him a new assignment. He was to be a sort of SAISC goodwill ambassador to the governments of foreign nations, and to other groups who were not government but were sympathetic to the Second Alliance’s aims. That was Crandall’s job, ostensibly.
    But the truth is, Crandall was a recruiter. He used his international fame, or simple bribery, to gain access to people high in governments, people on the fringe of governments, people in opposition to governments. And he recruited them into a new branch of the Alliance. This was called the AntiTerrorist Lobby. And it was a cover. It might have been more appropriately named SAISC Army Recruiting. Crandall was a recruiter for a new, multinational military and political machine. The men inducted into the machine used their influence to legislate a fund that would make their nation an official SA member. They would pay the SA to help them control their domestic terrorism—sometimes real terrorism, just as often it was mere dissent—and they agreed to contribute resources and manpower for the control of international terrorism  . . . 
    Each “member nation” provided men—reassigned from the military—for indoctrination in the SA’s Worldview Camps. The first and imperative goal of the operators of the Worldview Camps was to instill an absolute and undying loyalty to the SA in all “processees.” The processees were taught—brainwashed—to regard the SA as their true father and mother, their sovereign nation, and, most importantly, their link to God Himself. There was to be no possibility of sending men out for Alliance “actions” who were not genuinely loyal to Alliance aims. The Second Alliance had a public credo and a private credo. The private credo was the core of its real identity. It comes in onion-layers. Those who were first-layer processees in the Second Alliance heard a kind of standard Christian Born Again rhetoric. But in the second layer, the Initiates hear a kind of Identity