Islands in the Net (15 page)

[“Oh,”] King said in a small, now-I've-done-it voice.

“We'd be glad to have your input, if you could write it up and send e-mail. Atlanta can encrypt it for you.”

[“Yeah, sure,”] King said. [“Stupid of me … my apologies.”] Laura felt sorry for him. She was glad David had gotten him off her back, but she didn't like the way it sounded. The guy was being frank and up-front, in very Rizome-correct fashion, and here they were telling him to mind his manners because they were on spook business. How would it look?

David glanced at her and jerkily spread his hands, frowning. He looked frustrated.

Television. A kind of shellac of television surrounded and shielded both of them. It was like reaching out to touch someone's face, but feeling your fingers hit cold glass instead.

Andrei fired up the engine again. They picked up speed, scudding out to sea. Laura settled her videoglasses back carefully, blinking as her hair whipped around her head.

Caribbean water, smiling tropical sun, the cool, gleaming rush of speed below the bows. Intricate chunks of heavy industry loomed above the polluted shallows, huge, peculiar, ambitious … full of insistent thereness. Laura closed her eyes. Grenada! What in hell was she doing here? She felt dazed, culture-shocked. A garbled crackling of talk from Eric King. Suddenly the distant Net seemed to be digging into Laura's head like an earwig. She felt a quick impulse to strip off the glasses and fling them into the sea.

Loretta squirmed in her arms and tugged her blouse in a tight little fist. Laura forced her eyes open. Loretta was reality, she thought, hugging her. Her unfailing little guide. Real life was where the baby was.

Carlotta edged closer across the damp bottom of the boat. She waved her arm around her head. “Laura, you know why, all this?”

Laura shook her head.

“It's practice, that's what. Any one of these rigs—it could hold the whole Grenada Bank!” Carlotta pointed at a bizarre structure off to starboard—a flattened geodesic egg surrounded by buttressed pontoons. It looked like a fat soccer ball on bright orange spider's legs. “Maybe the Bank's computers are in there,” Carlotta insinuated. “Even if the Man comes down on Grenada, the Bank can just duck aside, like electric judo! All this ocean tech—they can jackleg way out into international waters, where the Man just can't reach.”

“The ‘Man'?” Laura said.

“The Man, the Combine, the Conspiracy. You know. The Patriarchy. The Law, the Heat, the Straights. The Net. Them.”

“Oh,” Laura said. “You mean ‘us.'”

Carlotta laughed.

Eric King broke in incredulously. [“Who is this strange woman? Can you give me another scan of that geodesic station? Thanks, uh, David … wild! You know what it looks like? It looks like your Lodge!”]

“I was just thinking that!” David said loudly, cupping his earphone. His eyes were riveted on the station and he was half leaning over the gunwale. “Can we cruise by it, Andrei?”

Andrei shook his head.

The stations fell behind them, their angular derricks framed against the curdled tropical green of the shoreline. The water grew choppier. The boat began to rock, its flat prow spanking each surge and flicking Laura's back with spray.

Andrei shouted and pointed off the port bow. Laura turned to look. He was pointing at a long, gray-black dike, a seawall. A four-story office building stood near one end of it. The installation was huge—the black dike was at least sixty feet high. Maybe a quarter mile long.

Andrei headed for it, and as they drew nearer, Laura saw little white spires scratching the skyline above the dike—tall street lights. Bicyclists rolled along the roadbed like gnats on wheels. And the office building looked more and more peculiar as they drew near—each story smaller than the last, stacked on a slant, with long metal stairs on the outside. And on its roof, a lot of tech busywork—satellite dishes, a radar mast.

The top story was round and painted nautical white. Like a smokestack.

It
was
a smokestack.

[“That's a U.L.C.C.!”] Eric King said.

“A what, Eric?” Laura said.

[“Ultra-Large Crude Carrier. A supertanker. Biggest ships ever built. Used to make the Persian Gulf run all the time, back in the old days.”] King laughed. [“Grenada has supertankers! I wondered where they'd ended up.”]

“You mean it floats? Laura said. “That seawall is a ship? The whole thing moves?”

“It can load half a million tons,” Carlotta said, luxuriating in Laura's surprise. “Like a skycraper full of crude. It's bigger than the Empire State Building. Lots bigger.” She laughed. “Course they don't have no crude in it, now. It's a righteous city now. One big factory.”

They cruised toward it at full speed. Laura saw surface surges cresting against its bulk, whacking against it like a cliffside. The supertanker didn't show the slightest movement in response. It was far, far too big for that. It wasn't like any kind of ship she'd ever imagined. It was like someone had cut off part of downtown Houston and welded it to the horizon.

And on the closer edge of the mighty deck she could see—what? Mango trees, lines of flapping laundry, people clustered at the long, long railing.… Hundreds of them. Far more than anybody could need for a crew. She spoke to Carlotta. “They live there, don't they.”

Carlotta nodded. “A lot goes on in these ships.”

“You mean there's more than one?”

Carlotta shrugged. “Maybe.” She tapped her own eyelid, indicating Laura's videoglasses. “Let's just say Grenada makes a pretty good flag of convenience.”

Laura stared at the supertanker, scanning its length carefully for the sake of Atlanta's tapes. “Even if the Bank bought it for junk—that's a lot of steel. Must have cost millions.”

Carlotta snickered. “You're not too hip about black markets, huh? The problem's always cash. What to do with it, I mean. Grenada's rich, Laura. And gettin' richer all the time.”

“But why buy ships?”

“Now you're getting into ideology,” Carlotta told her. “Have to ask ol' Andrei about that.”

Now Laura could see how old the monster was. Its sides were blotted with great caking masses of rust, sealed shut under layers of modern high-tech shellac. The shellac clung, but badly; in places it had the wrinkled look of failing plastic wrap. The ship's endless sheet-iron hull had flexed from heat and cold and loading stress, and even the enormous strength of modern bonded plastics couldn't hold. Laura saw stretch marks, and broken-edged blisters of “boat pox,” and patches of cracked alligatoring where the plastic had popped loose in plates, like dried mud. All this covered with patches of new glue and big slathery drips of badly cured gunk. A hundred shades of black and gray and rust. Here and there, work gangs had spray-bombed the hull of the supertanker with intricate colored graffiti. “TANKERSKANKERS,” “MONGOOSE CREW—WE OPTIMAL,” “CHARLIE NOGUES BATALLION.”

They tied up at a floating sea-level dock. The dock was like a flattened squid of bright yellow rubber, with radiating walkways and a floating bladder-head in the center. A bird-cage elevator slid down the dock's moored cable from a deck-level gantry seventy feet up. They followed Andrei into the cage and it rose, jerkily. David, who enjoyed heights, watched avidly through the bars as the sea shrank below them. Below his dark glasses, he grinned like a ten-year-old. He was really enjoying this, Laura realized as she clutched the baby's tote, white-knuckled. It was all right up his alley.

The gantry swung them over the deck. Laura saw the gantry's operator as they passed—she was an old black woman in dreadlocks, shuffling her knobbed gearshifts and rhythmically chewing gum. Below them, the monstrous deck stretched like an airport runway, broken with odd-looking functional clusters: dogged hatches, ridged metal vents, fireplugs, foam tanks, foil-wrapped hydraulic lines bent in reverse U's over the bicycle paths. Long tents, too, and patches of garden: trees in tubs, stretched greenhouse sheets of plastic over rows of citrus. And neatly stacked mountains of stuffed burlap bags.

They descended over a taped X on the deck and settled with a bump. “Everybody off,” Andrei said. They stepped out and the elevator rose at once. Laura sniffed the air. A familiar scent under the rust and brine and plastic. A wet, fermenting smell, like tofu.

“Scop!” David said, delighted. “Single-cell protein!”

“Yes,” Andrei said. “The
Charles Nogues
is a food ship.”

“Who's this ‘Nogues'?” David asked him.

“He was a native hero,” Andrei said, his face solemn.

Carlotta nodded at David. “Charles Nogues threw himself off a cliff.”

“What?” David said. “He was one of those Carib Indians?”

“No, he was a Free Coloured. They came later, they were anti-slavery. But the Redcoat army showed up, and they died fighting.” Carlotta paused. “It's an awful fuckin' mess, Grenada history. I learned all this from Sticky.”

“The crew of this ship are the vanguard of the New Millennium Movement,” Andrei declared. The four of them followed his lead, strolling toward the distant, looming high-rise of the ship's superstructure. It was hard not to see it as some peculiar office complex, because the ship itself felt so city-solid underfoot. Traffic passed them on the bicycle paths, men pedaling loaded cargo-rickshaws. “Trusted party cadres,” said blond, Polish Andrei. “Our
nomenklatura
.”

Laura fell a step behind, hefting the baby in her tote, while David and Andrei walked forward, shoulder to shoulder. “It's starting to make a certain conceptual sense,” David told him. “This time, if you get chased off your own island like Nogues and the Caribs, you'll have a nice place to jump to. Right?” He waved at the ship around them.

Andrei nodded soberly. “Grenada remembers her many invasions. Her people are very brave, and visionaries too, but she's a small country. But the ideas here today are big, David. Bigger than boundaries.”

David looked Andrei up and down, taking his measure. “What the hell is a guy from Gdansk doing here, anyway?”

“Life is dull in the Socialist Bloc,” Andrei told him airily. “All consumer socialism, no spiritual values. I wanted to be with the action. And the action is South, these days. The North, our developed world—it is boring. Predictable. This is the edge that cuts.”

“So you're not one of those ‘mad-doctor' types, huh?”

Andrei was contemptuous. “Such people are useful, only. We buy them, but they have no true role in the New Millennium Movement. They don't understand People's Tech.” Laura could hear the capital letters in his emphasis. She didn't like the way this was going at all.

She spoke up. “Sounds very nice. How do you square that with dope factories and data piracy?”

“All information should be free,” Andrei told her, slowing his walk. “As for drugs—” He reached into a side pocket in his jeans. He produced a flat roll of shiny paper and handed it to her.

Laura looked it over. Little peel-off rectangles of sticky-backed paper. It looked like a blank roll of address labels. “So?”

“You paste them on,” Andrei said patiently. “The glue has an agent, which carries the drug through the skin. The drug came from a wetware lab, it is synthetic THC, the active part of marijuana. Your little roll of paper is the same, you see, as many kilograms of hashish. It is worth about twenty ecu. Very little.” He paused. “Not so thrilling, so romantic, eh? Not so much to get excited about.”

“Christ,” Laura said. She tried to hand it back.

“Please keep it, it means very little.”

Carlotta spoke up. “She can't hold this, Andrei. Come on, they're online and the bosses are lookin'.” She stuffed the roll of paper into her purse, grinning at Laura. “You know, Laura, if you'd point those glasses over there to starboard, I can slap a little of this crystal on the back of your neck, and nobody in Atlanta will ever know. You can rush like Niagara on this stuff. Crystal THC, girl! The Goddess was cruisin' when She invented that one.”

“Those are
mind-altering drugs
,” Laura protested. She sounded stuffy and virtuous, even to herself. Andrei smiled indulgently, and Carlotta laughed aloud. “They're dangerous,” Laura said.

“Maybe you think it will jump off the paper and bite you,” Andrei said. He waved politely at a passing Rastaman.

“You know what I mean,” Laura said.

“Oh, yes”—Andrei yawned—“you never use drugs yourself, but what about the effect on people who are stupider and weaker than you, eh? You are patronizing other people. Invading their freedoms.”

They walked past a huge electric anchor winch, and a giant pump assembly, with two-story painted tanks in a jungle of pipes. Rastas with hard hats and clipboards paced the catwalks over the pipes.

“You're not being fair,” David said. “Drugs can trap people.”

“Maybe,” Andrei said. “If they have nothing better in their lives. But look at the crew on this ship. Do they seem like drugged wreckage to you? If America suffers from drugs, perhaps you should ask what America is lacking.”

[“What an asshole,”] Eric King commented suddenly. They ignored him.

Andrei led them up three flights of perforated iron stairs, bracketed to the portholed superstructure of the
Charles Nogues
. There was an intermittent flow of locals up and down the stairs, with chatting crowds on the landings. Everyone wore the same pocketed jeans and the standard-issue cotton blouses. But a chosen few had plastic shirt-pocket protectors, with pens. Two pens, or three pens, or even four. One guy, a beer-bellied Rasta with a frown and bald spot, had half a dozen gold-plated fibertips. He was followed by a crowd of flunkies. “Whoopee, real Socialism,” Laura muttered at Carlotta.

“I can take the baby if you want.” Carlotta said, not hearing her. “You must be getting tired.”