Islands in the Net (29 page)

“I'm better with him, usually.” She forced a smile. “But right now I'm on-rag.”

“Oh, gosh.” Emily gave her a tissue. “No wonder.”

“Sorry.”

Emily touched her shoulder gently. “I always hassle you with my problems, Laura. But you never lean on me. Always so controlled. Everyone says so.” She hesitated. “You and David need some time together.”

“We'll have all the time in the world when I get back.”

“Maybe you ought to think it over.”

“It's no use, Emily. We can't get away from it.” She wiped her eyes. “It was something Stubbs told me, before they killed him. One world means there's no place to hide.” She shook her head, tossed her hair back, forced the sting in her eyes to fade. “Hell, Singapore's just a phone call away. I'll call David from there every day. Make it up to him.”

Singapore.

7

Singapore. Hot tropic light slanted through brown wooden shutters. A ceiling fan creaked and wobbled, creaked and wobbled, and dust motes did a slow atomic dance above her head.

She was on a cot, in an upstairs room, in an elderly waterfront barn. Rizome's HQ in Singapore—the Rizome godown.

Laura sat up, reluctantly, blinking. Thin wood-grain linoleum, cool and tacky under her sweating feet. The siesta had made her head hurt.

Massive steel I-beams pierced through floor and ceiling, their whitewash peeling over lichen patches of rust. The walls around her were piled high with bright, unstable heaps of crates and cardboard boxes. Canned hairspray that was bad for the atmosphere. Ladies' beauty soap full of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Quack tonics of zinc and ginseng that claimed to cure impotence and clarify the spleen. All this evil crap had come with the place when the previous owners went bankrupt. Suvendra's Rizome crew refused to market it.

Sooner or later they would toss it out and take the loss, but in the meantime a clan of geckos had set up housekeeping in the nooks and crannies. Geckos—wall-walking lizards with pale, translucent skins, and slitted eyes, and swollen-fingered paws. Here came one now, picking its way stealthily across the water-stained ceiling. It was the big matronly-looking one that liked to crouch overhead by the light fixture. “Hello, Gwyneth,” Laura called to it, and yawned.

She checked her wrist. Four
P.M.
She was still far behind on her sleep, hurry and worry and jet lag, but it was time to get up and get back after it.

She stepped into her jeans, straightened her T-shirt. Her deck sat on a small folding table, behind a big woven basket of paper flowers. Some Singapore politico had sent Laura the bouquet as a welcome gift. Customary. She'd kept it, though, because she'd never seen paper flowers like they made here in Singapore. They were extremely elegant, almost scary looking in their museum-replica perfection. Red hibiscus, white chrysanthemum, Singapore's national colors. Beautiful and perfect and unreal. They smelled like French cologne.

She sat, and turned the deck on, and loaded data. Pop-topped a jug of mineral water and poured it in a dragon-girdled teacup. She sipped, and studied her screen, and was absorbed.

The world around her faded. Into black glass, green lettering. The inner world of the Net.

PARLIAMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF SINGAPORE

Select Committee on Information Policy

Public hearings, October 9, 2023

COMMITTEE CHAIR

S. P. Jeyaratnam, M.P. (Jurong), P.I.P.

VICE-CHAIR

Y. H. Leong, M.P. (Moulmein), P.I.P.

A. bin Awang, M.P. (Bras Basah), P.I.P.

T. B. Pang, M.P. (Queenstown), P.I.P.

C. H. Quah, M.P. (Telok Blangah), P.I.P.

Dr. R. Razak, M.P. (Anson), Anti-Labour Party

Transcript of Testimony

MR
.
JEYARATNAM:
… accusations scarcely less than libelous!

MRS
.
WEBSTER:
I'm well aware of the flexibility of the local laws of libel.

MR. JEYARATNAM:
Are you slurring the integrity of our legal system?

MRS
.
WEBSTER:
Amnesty International has a list of eighteen local political activists, bankrupted or jailed through your Government's libel actions.

MR
.
JEYARATNAM:
This committee will not be used as a globalist soapbox! Could you apply such high standards to your good friends in Grenada?

MRS. WEBSTER:
Grenada is an autocratic dictatorship practicing political torture and murder, Mr. Chairman.

MR
.
JEYARATNAM:
Indeed. But this has not prevented you Americans from cosying up to them. Or from attacking us: a fellow industrial democracy.

MRS. WEBSTER:
I'm not a United States diplomat, I'm a Rizome associate. My direct concern is with your corporate policies. Singapore's information laws promote industrial piracy and invasion of privacy. Your Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank may have a better screen of legality, but it's damaged my company's interests as badly as the United Bank of Grenada. If not more so. We don't want to offend your pride or your sovereignty or whatever, but we want those policies changed. That's why I came here.

MR. JEYARATNAM:
You equate our democratic government with a terrorist regime.

MRS. WEBSTER:
I don't equate you, because I can't believe that Singapore is responsible for the vicious attack that I saw. But Grenadians do believe it, because they know full well that you and they are rivals in piracy, and so you have a motive. And for revenge, I think … I
know
, that they are capable of almost anything.

MR. JEYARATNAM:
Anything? How many battalions does this witch doctor have?

MRS. WEBSTER:
I can only tell you what they told me. Just before I left, a Grenadian cadre named Andrei Tarkovsky gave me a message for you.
(Mrs. Webster's testimony deleted)

MR. JEYARATNAM:
Order, please! This is rank terrorist propaganda.… Chair recognizes Mr. Pang for a motion.

MR. PANG:
I move that the subversive terrorist message be stricken from the record.

MRS. QUAH:
Second the motion.

MR. JEYARATNAM:
It is so ordered.

DR. RAZAK:
Mr. Chairman, I wish to be recorded as objecting to this foolish act of censorship.

MRS. WEBSTER:
Singapore could be next! I saw it happen! Legalisms—that won't help you if they sow mines through your city and firebomb it!

MR. JEYARATNAM:
Order! Order, please, ladies and gentlemen.

DR. RAZAK:
… a kind of innkeeper?

MRS. WEBSTER:
We in Rizome don't have “jobs,” Dr. Razak. Just things to do and people to do them.

DR. RAZAK:
My esteemed colleagues of the People's Innovation Party might call that “inefficient.”

MRS. WEBSTER:
Well, our idea of efficiency has more to do with personal fulfillment than, uh, material possessions.

DR. RAZAK:
I understand that large numbers of Rizome employees do no work at all.

MRS. WEBSTER:
Well, we take care of our own. Of course a lot of that activity is outside the money economy. An invisible economy that isn't quantifiable in dollars.

DR. RAZAK:
In ecu, you mean.

MRS. WEBSTER:
Yes, sorry. Like housework: you don't get any money for doing it, but that's how your family survives, isn't it? Just because it's not in a bank doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Incidentally, we're not “employees,” but “associates.”

DR. RAZAK:
In other words, your bottom line is ludic joy rather than profit. You have replaced “labour,” the humiliating specter of “forced production,” with a series of varied, playlike pastimes. And replaced the greed motive with a web of social ties, reinforced by an elective power structure.

MRS. WEBSTER:
Yes, I think so … if I understand your definitions.

DR. RAZAK:
How long before you can dispose of “work” entirely?

Singha Pura meant “Lion City.” But there had never been lions on Singapore island.

The name had to make some kind of sense, though. So local legend said the “lion” had been a sea monster.

On the opposite side of Singapore's National Stadium, a human sea lifted their flash cards and showed Laura their monster. The Singapore “merlion,” in a bright mosaic of cardboard squares.

Loud, patriotic applause from a packed crowd of sixty thousand.

The merlion had a fish's long, scaled body and the lion head of the old British Empire. They had a statue of it in Merlion Park at the mouth of the Singapore River. The thing was thirty feet high, a genuinely monstrous hybrid.

East and West—like cats and fishes—never the twain shall meet. Until some bright soul had simply chopped the fish's head off and stuck the lion's on. And there you had it: Singapore.

Now there were four million of them and they had the biggest goddamn skyscrapers in the world.

Suvendra, sitting next to Laura in the bleachers, offered her a paper bag of banana chips. Laura took a handful and knocked back more lemon squash. The stadium hawkers were selling the best fast food she'd ever eaten.

Back across the field there was another practiced flurry. A big grinning face this time, flash-card pixels too big and crude, like bad computer graphics.

“It is the specimen they are showing,” Suvendra said helpfully. Tiny little Malay woman in her fifties, with oily hair in a chignon and frail, protuberant ears. Wearing a yellow sundress, tennis hat, and a Rizome neck scarf. Next to her a beefy Eurasian man chewed sunflower seeds and carefully spat the hulls into a small plastic trash bag.

“The what?” Laura said.

“Spaceman. Their cosmonaut.”

“Oh, right.” So that was Singapore's astronaut, grinning from his space helmet. It looked like a severed head stuck in a television.

A roar from the western twilight. Laura cringed. Six matte-black pterodactyls buzzed the stadium. Nasty-looking things. Combat jets from the Singapore Air Force, the precision flyers, Chrome Angels or whatever they called themselves. The jets spat corkscrewed plumes of orange smoke from their canted wing tips. The crowd jumped gleefully to their feet, whooping and brandishing their programs.

The Boys and Girls Brigades poured onto the soccer field, in red-and-white T-shirts and little billed caps. They assumed formation, twirling long, ribbony streamers from broomsticks. Antiseptic marching school kids, of every race and creed, though you wouldn't guess it to look at them. “They are very well trained, isn't it?” Suvendra said.

“Yeah.”

A video scoreboard towered at the eastern end of the field. It showed a live feed of the televised coverage from the Singapore Broadcasting Service. The screen flashed a closeup from within the stadium's celebrity box. The local bigwigs, watching the kids with that beaming, sentimental look that politicos reserved for voters' children.

Laura studied them. The guy in the linen suit was S. P. Jeyaratnam, Singapore's communications czar. A spiky-eyebrowed Tamil with the vaguely unctuous look of a sacred Thuggee strangler. Jeyaratnam was formerly a journalist, now chief hatchet man for the People's Innovation Party. He had a talent for invective. Laura hadn't liked tangling with him.

Singapore's prime minister noticed the camera. He tipped his gold-bridged sunglasses down his nose and peered at the lens. He winked.

The crowd elbowed each other and squirmed with delight.

Chuckling amiably, the P.M. murmured to the woman beside him, a young Chinese actress with high-piled hair and a gold chiton. The girl laughed with practiced charisma. The P.M. flicked back the smooth, dark wing of hair across his forehead. Gleam of strong, young teeth.

The video board left the celebs and switched to the plunging, boot-clad legs of a majorette.

The kids left the stadium to fond applause, and two long lines of military police marched in. White chin-strapped helmets, white Sam Browne belts, pressed khakis, spit-polished boots. The soldiers faced the stands and began a complex rifle drill. Snappy over-the-shoulder high toss, in a precisely timed cascade.

“Kim looks good today,” Suvendra said. Everybody in Singapore called the prime minister by his first name. His name was Kim Swee Lok—or Lok Kim Swee, to his fellow ethnic Chinese.

“Mmm,” Laura said.

“You are quiet this evening.” Suvendra put a butterfly touch on Laura's forearm. “Still tired from testimony, isn't it?”

“He reminds me of my husband,” Laura blurted.

Suvendra smiled. “He's a good-looking bloke, your husband.”

Laura felt a tingle of unease. She'd flown around the world with such bruising speed—the culture shock had odd side effects. Some pattern-seeking side of her brain had gone into overdrive. She'd seen Singapore store clerks with the faces of pop stars, and street cops who looked like presidents. Even Suvendra herself reminded Laura somehow of Grace Webster, her mother-in-law. No physical resemblance, but the vibe was there. Laura had always gotten on very well with Grace.

Kim's practiced appeal made Laura feel truly peculiar. His influence over this little city-state had a personal intimacy that was almost erotic. It was as if Singapore had married him. His People's Innovation Party had annihilated the opposition parties at the ballot box. Democratically, legally—but the Republic of Singapore was now essentially a one-party state.

The whole little republic, with its swarming traffic and cheerful, disciplined populace, was now in the hands of a thirty-two-year-old visionary genius. Since his election to Parliament at twenty-three, Kim Lok had reformed the civil service, masterminded a vast urban development scheme, and revitalized the army. And while carrying on a series of highly public love affairs, he had somehow managed to pick up advanced degrees in engineering and political science. His rise to power had been unstoppable, buoyed by a strange mix of menace and playboy appeal.