Islands in the Net (24 page)

“Yeah. She was there. We were offline together for just a second in one of the aquaculture rooms. It wasn't wired, see. And she kind of sways over, slips her hand up under my shirt, and says … I don't remember exactly, but it was something like: ‘Ever wonder what it would be like? We know a lot of things Laura doesn't.'”

Laura turned livid. “What was that?” she demanded. “What about her hand?”

David blinked, his smile fading. “She just ran her hand over my ribs. To show she meant business, I guess.” He was already defensive. “Don't blame me. I wasn't asking for it.”

“I'm not blaming you, but I'm the one that means your business,” Laura told him. Long silence. “And I kind of wish you weren't so gleeful about it.”

David could not hide his grin. “Well … I guess it was kind of flattering. I mean, everybody we know, knows we have a solid thing together, so it's not like the woods are full of women flinging themselves at me.… Y'know, it wasn't even so much that Carlotta herself was making a pass.… It was sort of a generic hooker pass. Like a business proposition.”

He let Loretta grip his fingers. “Don't think too much of it. You were right when you said they were trying to get at us. It's like, they use whatever they can. Drugs—we don't go for that. Money—well, we're not breadheads.… Sex—I think they just told Carlotta to try it, and she said she would. None of that means much. But man—
creative potential
—I'm not ashamed to say that got me where I lived.”

“What a shitty thing to do,” Laura said. “At the very least, she could have sent some other Church girl.”

“Yeah,” he mused, “but maybe another girl would have looked better.… Oh, sorry. Forget I said that. I'm drunk.”

She forced herself to think about it. Maybe he'd been offline for just five minutes in that offline netherworld they had here, and maybe, just maybe, he'd done it. Maybe he'd slept with Carlotta. She could feel her world cracking at the thought, like ice over deep black water.

David played with the baby, a harmless tra-la-la expression on his face. No. No way he could have done it. She'd never even doubted him before. Never like this.

It was like a dozen years of confident adulthood had split open in black crevasses. Way down there, raw scars of the world-eating fear she'd felt, when she was nine years old and her parents broke up. Rum soured in her stomach, and she felt a sudden cramping pang.

It was another ploy, she thought grimly. They weren't going to do this to her. Everyone had insecurities. They knew about hers—they knew her personal history. But they weren't going to play on her private feelings of dread and make her start doubting reality. She wouldn't let them. No. No more weaknesses. Nothing but stern resolve. Until she'd put an end to this.

She stood up and walked quickly through the bedroom, to the bath. She threw off her filthy clothes. There was a stain. Her period had started. The first she'd had since the pregnancy. “Oh, fuck,” she said, and burst into tears. She got into the shower and let the needle-thin gush of odd-smelling water blast her face.

The weeping helped. She flushed the weakness out like poison in her tears. Then she put on mascara and eye shadow, so he wouldn't see the redness. And she wore a dress for dinner.

David was still full of the things he'd seen, so she let him talk, and just smiled and nodded, in Rita's candlelight.

He was serious about staying in Grenada. “The tech is more important than the politics,” he told her blithely. “That crap never lasts, but a real innovation's like a permanent infrastructural asset!” The two of them could form a real ‘Rizome Grenada'—it would be like arranging the Lodge, but on a scale twenty times bigger, and with
free money
. They would show them what a Rizome architect could do—and it'd be a foothold for some sane social values. Sooner or later the Net would civilize the place—wean them away from their crazy piracy bullshit. Grenada didn't need dope, it needed food and shelter.

They went to bed, and David reached for her. And she had to tell him she had her period. He was surprised, and glad. “I thought you were looking a little stressed,” he said. “It's been a whole year, hasn't it? Must feel pretty weird to have it back.”

“No,” she said, “it's just … natural. You get used to it.”

“You haven't said much tonight,” he said. He rubbed her stomach gently. “Kind of mysterious.”

“I'm just tired,” she said. “I can't really talk about it just now.”

“Don't let 'em get you down. Those Bank creeps aren't so much,” he said. “I hope we get a chance to meet old Louison, the prime minister. Down in the projects, people were talking about him like these Bank hustlers were just his errand boys.” He hesitated. “I don't like the way they talked about Louison. Like they were really scared.”

“Sticky told me there's a lot of war talk,” Laura told him. “The army's on alert. People are tense.”

“
You're
tense,” he said, rubbing her. “Your shoulders are like wood.” He yawned. “You know you can tell me anything, Laura. We don't keep secrets, you know that.”

“I want to see the tapes tomorrow,” she said. “We'll go over 'em together, like you said.” There was bound to be a flaw in them, she thought. Somewhere, a little flicker, or a misplaced chunk of pixels. Something that would prove that they were faked, and that she wasn't crazy. She couldn't have people thinking she was cracking up. It would ruin everything.

She was unable to sleep. The day tossed through her mind, over and over. And the cramps were bad. At half past midnight she gave up and put on a robe.

David had made Loretta a crib—a little square corral, padded all around with blankets. Laura looked over her little girl and cradled her with a glance. Then back at David. It was funny how much they looked alike when they slept. Father and daughter. Some strange human vitality that had passed through her, that she'd nurtured within herself. Wonderful, painful, eerie. The house was still as death.

She heard distant thunder. From the north. Hollow, repeated booms. It was going to rain. That would be nice. A little tropic rain to soothe her nerves.

She walked silently through the living room onto the porch. She and David had cleared the junk away and swept the place; it was comfortable there now. She swung out the arms of an old Morris chair and reclined in it, propping up her tired legs. Warm garden air with the heavy-lidded perfume reek of ylang-ylang. No rain yet. The air was full of tension.

The distant lights at the gate flashed on. Laura winced and lifted her head. The two night guards—she didn't know their names yet—had come out and were conferring over their belt phones.

She heard a pop overhead. Very quiet, unobtrusive, like a rafter settling. Then another one: a faint metallic bonk, and a rustle. Very quiet, like birds landing.

Something had dropped onto the roof. Something had hit the top of one of the turrets—bonked off its tin roof onto the shingles.

White glare sheeted over the yard, silently. White glare from the top of the mansion. The guards looked up, startled. They flung their arms up in surprise, like bad actors.

The roof began crackling.

Laura stood up and screamed at the top of her lungs.

She dashed through the darkened house to the bedroom. The baby had jerked awake and was howling in fear. David was sitting up in bed, dazed. “We're on fire,” she told him.

He catapulted out of bed and stumbled into his pants. “Where?”

“The roof. In two places. Fire bombs, I think.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “You grab Loretta and I'll get the others.”

She strapped Loretta into her tote and tossed their decks into a suitcase. She could smell smoke by the time she'd finished. And there was a steady crackling roar.

She hauled the baby and the suitcase out into the yard. She left Loretta in her tote, behind the fountain, then turned to look. One of the turrets was wrapped in flames. A leaping ulcer of fire spread over the west wing.

Rajiv and Jimmy came out, half carrying a coughing, weeping Rita. Laura ran to them. She sank her nails into Rajiv's naked arm. “Where's my husband, you stupid bastard!”

“Very sorry, madam,” Rajiv whimpered. He tugged nervously at his drooping pants. “Sorry, madam, very sorry …”

She shoved him aside so hard that he spun and fell. She vaulted the stairs and rushed back in, ignoring their yells.

David was in the bedroom. He was crouched almost double, with a wet washcloth pressed to his face. He was wearing his videoglasses, and had hers propped on his head. The bedside clock was clamped under his armpit. “Just a sec,” he muttered, fixing her with blank, gold-etched eyes. “Gotta find my toolbox.”

“Fuck it, David, go!” She hauled at his arm. He went reluctantly, stumbling.

Once outside, they had to back away from the heat. One by one, the upper rooms were beginning to explode. David dropped his washcloth, numbly. “Flashover,” he said, staring.

A fist of dirty flame punched out an upstairs window. Shards of glass fountained across the lawn. “The heat builds up,” David muttered clinically. “The whole room ignites at once. And the gas pressure just blows the walls out.”

The soldiers pushed them back, holding their stupid, useless tangle-guns at chest level, like police batons. David went reluctantly, hypnotized by destruction. “I've run simulations of this, but I've never seen it happen,” he said, to no one in particular. “Jesus, what a sight!”

Laura shoved one of the teenage soldiers as he trampled her bare foot. “Some help you are, asshole! Where in hell is the fire department or whatever you use in this godforsaken place?”

The boy backed off, trembling, and dropped his gun. “Look at the sky!” He pointed northeast.

Low scud of burning clouds on the northern horizon. Lit like dawn with ugly, burning amber. “What the hell,” David said, marveling. “That's miles away.… Laura, that's Point Sauteur. It's the whole fucking complex off there. That's a refinery fire!”

“Brimstone fire,” the soldier wailed. He started sobbing, dabbing at his face. The other soldier, a bigger man, kicked him hard in the leg. “Pick up you weapon, bloodclot!”

A distant dirty flash lit the clouds. “Man, I hope they haven't hit the tankers,” David said. “Man, I hope the poor bastards on those rigs have lifeboats.” He tugged at his earpiece. “You getting all this, Atlanta?”

Laura pulled her own rig off his head. She backed away and fetched Loretta in her tote. She pulled the screaming baby free of the thing and cradled her against her chest, rocking her and murmuring.

Then she put the glasses on.

Now she could watch it without hurting so much.

The mansion burned to the ground. It took all night. Their little group huddled together in the guardhouse, listening to tales of disaster on the phones.

Around seven
A.M.
, a spidery military chopper arrived and set down by the fountain.

Andrei, the Polish emigré, hopped out. He took a large box from the pilot and joined them at the gates.

Andrei's left arm was wrapped in medicinal gauze, and he stank of chemical soot. “I have brought shoes and uniforms for all survivors,” he announced. The box was full of flat, plastic-wrapped packs: the standard cadre's jeans and short-sleeved shirts. “Very sorry to be such bad hosts,” Andrei told them somberly. “The Grenadian People apologize to you.”

“At least we survived,” Laura told him. She slipped her bare feet gratefully into the soft deck shoes. “Who took credit?”

“The malefactors of the F.A.C.T. have broken all civilized bounds.”

“I figured,” Laura said, taking the box. “We'll take turns changing inside the guardhouse. David and I will go first.” Inside, she shucked out of her flimsy nightrobe and buttoned on the stiff, fresh shirt and heavy jeans. David put on a shirt and shoes.

They stepped out and Rita went in, shivering. “Now, you will please join me in the helicopter,” Andrei said. “The world must know of this atrocity.…”

“All right,” Laura said. “Who's online?”

[“Practically everybody,”] Emily told her. [“We got you on a live feed throughout the company, and to a couple of news services. Vienna's gonna have a hard time holding this one.… It's just too big.”]

Andrei paused at the chopper's hatchway. “Can you leave the baby?”

“No way,” David said flatly. They climbed into two crash couches in the back, and David held Loretta's tote in his lap. Andrei took the copilot's seat and they buckled in.

Up and away in a quiet hiss of rotor blades.

David glanced out the bulletproof window at the mansion's black wreckage. “Any idea what hit our house?”

“Yes. There were many of them. Very small, cheap planes—paper and bamboo, like children's kites. Radar-transparent. Many have crashed now, but not before they dropped their many bombs. Little thermite sticks with flaming jelly.”

“Were they hitting us in particular? Rizome, I mean?”

Andrei shrugged in his shoulder harness. “It is hard to say. Many such houses have burned. The communiqué does mention you.… I have it here.” He passed them a printout. Laura glanced at it: date and tag line, and block after block of the usual Stalinist garbage. “Do you have a casualty count?”

“Seven hundred so far. It is rising. They are still pulling bodies from the offshore rigs. They hit us with antiship missiles.”

“Good God,” David said.

“Those were heavy armaments. We have choppers out looking for ships. There may have been several. But there are many ships in the Caribbean, and missiles have a long range.” He reached into his shirt pocket. “Have you see these before?”

Laura took the object from his fingers. It looked like a big plastic paper clip. It was speckled camo-green and brown, and weighed almost nothing. “No.”