Islands in the Net (31 page)

It had lasted maybe forty seconds.

An elderly turbanned Sikh limped past her, his white beard dripping blood.

Down in the soccer field the crowd was milling, slowly. The police had rallied here and there, clumps of white helmets. They were trying to make people sit. Some were doing it, but most were shying away, dumb and reluctant, like cattle.

Laura sucked her mashed knuckles and gazed down in wonder.

It was all for
nothing
. Sensible, civilized people had boiled out of their seats and trampled each other to death. For no sane reason at all. Now that it was over, they weren't even trying to leave the stadium. Some of them were even
returning to their seats in the bleachers
. Faces drained, legs rubbery—the look of zombies.

At the far end of Laura's bleacher, a fat woman in a flowered sari was shaking and screaming. She was hitting her husband with her floppy straw hat, over and over again.

There was a touch on Laura's shoulder. Suvendra sat beside her, her binoculars in her hand. “You are all right?”

“Mama,” the little boy begged. He was about six. He had a gold ID bracelet and a T-shirt with a bust of Socrates.

“I hid. Like you did,” Laura told Suvendra. She cleared her throat shakily. “That was smart.”

“I have seen such troubles before, in Djakarta,” Suvendra said.

“What the hell happened?”

Suvendra tapped her binoculars and pointed at the celebrity box. “I have spotted Kim there. He is alive.”

“Kim! But I saw him die.…”

“You saw a dirty trick,” Suvendra said soberly. “What you saw was not possible. Even Kim Swee Lok cannot spit fire and explode.” Suvendra winced a little, sourly. “They knew he was scheduled to speak today. They had time to prepare. The terrorists.”

Laura knotted her hands. “Oh, Jesus.”

Suvendra nodded at the static-laden screen. “The authorities have shut it down, now. Because it was sabotaged, yes? Someone pirated that screen and put on a nightmare. To frighten the city.”

“But what about that weird, vile stuff Kim was babbling.… He looked doped!” Laura smoothed the boy's hair absently. “But that had to be faked, too. It was all a faked tape. Right? So Kim's all right, really.”

Suvendra touched her binoculars. “No, I saw him. They were carrying him.… I'm afraid the celebrity box was booby-trapped. Kim fell into a trap.”

“You mean all that really happened? Kim actually
said that?
All about dogs and … oh, God, no.”

“To drug a man so to play a fool, then make him seem to burn alive—that might seem pleasant—to a voodoo man.” Suvendra stood up, tying the ribbons of her sun hat under her chin.

“But Kim … he said he wanted peace with Grenada.”

“Hurting Kim is a stupid blunder. We could have worked things out sensibly,” Suvendra said. “But then, we are not terrorists.” She opened her purse and dug out a cigarette.

A woman in a torn satin blouse limped up the aisle, screaming for someone named Lee.

“You can't smoke in public,” Laura said blankly. “It's illegal here.”

Suvendra smiled. “Rizome must help these poor mad people. I hope you are remembering your first-aid training.”

Laura lay in her Rizome camp bed, feeling like shredded confetti. She touched her wrist. Three
A.M.
Singapore time, Friday, October 13. The window glowed palely with the bluish light of arc lamps from the wharfs of East Lagoon. Longshore robots on big lugged tires rolled unerringly through patches of darkness. A skeletal crane dipped into the holds of a Rumanian cargo clipper, the vast iron arm moving with mindless persistence, shuffling giant cargo containers like alphabet blocks.

A television flickered at the foot of Laura's cot, its sound off. Some local newsman, a government-approved flunky like all the newsmen here in Singapore … like newsmen everywhere, when you came right down to it. Reporting from the hospitals …

When Laura closed her eyes, she could still see chests laboring beneath torn shirts and the gloved, probing fingers of the paramedics. Somehow the screams had been the worst, more unnerving than the sight of blood. That nerve-shredding din of pain, the animal sounds people made when their dignity was ripped away …

Eleven dead. Only eleven, a miracle. Before this day she'd never known how tough the human body was, that flesh and blood were like rubber, full of unexpected elasticity. Women, little old ladies, had been at the bottom of massive, scrambling pileups and somehow come out alive. Like the little Chinese granny with her ribs cracked and her wig knocked off, who had thanked Laura over and over with apologetic nods of her threadbare head, like the riot was all her own fault.

Laura couldn't sleep, still dully tingling with an alchemy of horror and elation. Once again the black water of her nightmares had broken into her life. But she was
getting better at it
. This time she had actually saved someone. She had jumped out into the middle of it and rescued someone, a random statistic: little Geoffrey Yong. Little Geoffrey, who lived in Bukit Timah district and was in first grade and took violin lessons. She'd given him back, alive and whole, to his mother.

“I have a little girl myself,” Laura had told her. Mrs. Yong had given her an unforgettable spirit-lifting look of vast and mystical gratitude. Battlefield gallantry, from sister-soldiers in the Army of Motherhood.

She checked her watchphone again. Just now noon, in Georgia. She could phone David again, at his hideout at a Rizome Retreat. It would be great to hear his voice again. They missed each other terribly, but at least he was there on the phone, to give her the view from the outside world and tell her she was doing well. It made all the difference, took the weight off. She needed desperately to talk about what had happened. To hear the baby's sweet little voice. And to make arrangements to get the hell out of this no-neck town and back where she belonged.

She tapped numbers. Dial tone. Then nothing. Damned thing was broken or something. Cracked in the crush.

She sat up in bed and tried some functions. Still had all her appointment notes, and the list of tourist data they'd given her at customs.… Maybe the signal was bad, too much steel in the walls of this stupid barn. She'd slept in some dumps in her day, but this retro-fitted godown was pushing it, even for Rizome.

A flicker on the television. Laura glanced down.

Four kids in white karate outfits—no, Greek tunics—had rushed the reporter. They had him down on the pavement outside the hospital, and they were methodically kicking and punching him. Young guys, students maybe. Striped bandannas hid their mouths and noses. One of them batted at the camera with a protest sign in hasty, splattered Chinese.

The scene blinked away to an anchor room where a middle-aged Eurasian woman was staring at her monitor aghast.

Laura quickly turned up the sound. The anchor woman jerkily grabbed a sheaf of printout. She began speaking Chinese.

“Damn!” Laura switched channels.

Press conference. Chinese guy in medical whites. He had that weird, repulsive look common to some older Singaporeans—the richer ones. A tightened vampire face, sleek, ageless skin. Part hair dye, part face-lift, part monkey glands maybe, or weekly blood changes tapped from teenage Third Worlders …

“… full function, yes,” Dr. Vampire said. “Today, many people with Tourette's Syndrome can live quite normal lives.”

Mumble mumble mumble from the floor. This thing looked taped. Laura wasn't sure why. Somehow it lacked that fresh feeling.

“After the attack, Miss Ting held the prime minister's hands,” said Dr. Vamp. “Because of this, the transfer agent contaminated her fingers also. Of course, the drug dosage was much lower than that received by the prime minister. We still have Miss Ting under observation. But the convulsions and so forth were, ah, never in question in her case.”

Laura felt a surge of shock and loathing. That poor little actress. They got Kim through something he touched, and she held his hands. Holding the hands of her country's leader while he was foaming and screaming like some rabid baboon. Oh, Christ. What did Miss Ting think when she realized she was getting it, too? Laura missed the next question. Mumble mumble Grenada mumble.

Frown, dismissive wave. “The use of biomedicine for political terrorism is … horrifying. It violates every conceivable ethical code.”

“You fucking hypocrite!” Laura shouted at the box.

Light rap at her door. Laura started, then tugged her cotton T-shirt lower, over her underwear. “Come in?”

Suvendra's husband peeked around the door, a natty little man wearing a hair net and paper pajamas. “I am hearing you awake,” he said politely. His accent was even less comprehensible than Suvendra's. “There is a messenger at loading gate. He ask for you!”

“Oh. Okay. Be right down.” He left and Laura jumped into her jeans. Grenadian cadre jeans—now that she'd broken them in, she liked them. She kicked on cheap foam sandals she'd bought locally for the price of a pack of gum.

Out the room, up the hall, down the catwalk stairs, under the arching girders and the dusty arc-lit glass. Walls lined with domino stacks of container shipping, socketed steel boxes the size of mobile homes. A dock robot sprawled wheelless on a hydraulic lift. Smell of rice and grease and coffee beans and rubber.

Outside the godown, at the truck dock, one of Suvendra's Rizome crew was talking with the messenger. They spotted her, and there was a quick flare of red as the Rizome kid stomped out a cigarette.

The messenger's sandaled feet were propped on the handlebars of his rickshaw, an elegant, springy tricycle framed in lacquered bamboo and piano wire.

The boy leapt from his seat with easy, balletic grace. He wore a white muscle shirt and cheap paper slacks. He looked about seventeen, a Malay kid with brown shoe-button eyes and arms like a gymnast. “Good evening, madam.”

“Hi,” Laura said. They shook hands, and he stuck his knuckle into her palm. A secret-society shake.

“He is ‘lazy' and ‘stupid,'” the Rizome kid hinted. Like the rest of Suvendra's local crew, the Rizome kid was not Singaporean, but a Maphilindonesian, from Djakarta. His name was Ali.

“Huh?” Laura said.

“I am ‘unfit for conventional employment,'” the messenger said, meaningfully.

“Oh. Right,” Laura said, realizing. The kid was from the local opposition. The Anti-Labour Party.

Suvendra had scraped up a little solidarity with the leader of the Anti-Labourites. His name was Razak. Like Suvendra, Razak was a Malay, a minority group in a city 80 percent Chinese. He had managed to cobble together a fragile local mandate: part ethnic, part class-based, but mostly pure lunatic fringe.

Razak's political philosophy was bizarre, but he had held out stubbornly against the assaults of Kim's ruling party. Therefore, he was now in a position to raise embarrassing questions on the floor of Parliament. His interests partly coincided with Rizome's, so they were allies.

And the Anti-Labourites made full use of the alliance, too. Ragged bands of them hung out at the Rizome godown, cadging handouts, using the phones and bathroom, running off peculiar handbills on the company Xerox. In the mornings they grouped together in the city parks, eating protein paste and practicing martial arts in their torn paper pants. People gathered to laugh at them.

Laura gave the kid her best conspiratorial glance. “Thanks for coming so late. I appreciate your, uh, dedication.”

The boy shrugged. “No problem, madam. I am the observer for your civil rights.”

Laura glanced at Ali. “What?”

“He is staying this place all night,” Ali said. “He is observing for our civil rights.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Laura said vaguely. It seemed as good an excuse to loiter as any. “We could send down some food or something.”

“I eat only scop,” the boy said. He plucked a crumpled envelope from a hidden slot under his rickshaw seat. Parliamentary stationery:
THE HONORABLE DR
.
ROBERT RAZAK
,
M.P
. (Anson).

“It's from Bob,” Laura told them, hoping to retrieve some lost prestige. She opened it.

A hasty scrawl of red ink above a printout.

Despite our well-founded ideological opposition we of the Anti-Labour Party do of course maintain files in the Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank, and this message arrived at 2150 hrs local time, tagged for you. If reply is necessary, do not use local phone system. Wishing you the best of luck in these difficult times. Message follows:
YDOOL EQKOF UHFNH HEBSG HNDGH QNOQP LUDOO
.
JKEIL KIFUL FKEIP POLKS DOLFU JENHF HFGSE!
IHFUE KYFEN KUBES KUVNE KNESE NHWQQ KVNEI?
JEUNF HFENA OBGHE BHSIF WHIBE
.
QHIRS QIFES BEHSE IPHES HBESA HFIEW HBEIA!

DAVID

“It's from David,” Laura blurted. “My husband.”

“Husband,” the Party kid mused. He seemed sorry to hear that she had one.

“Why this? Why didn't he just phone me?” Laura said.

“The phones being out of order,” the boy said. “Full of spooks.”

“Spooks?” Laura said. “You mean spies?”

The boy muttered something in Malay. “He means demons,” Ali translated. “Evil spirits.”

“You kidding?” Laura said.

“It tell me they are evil spirits,” said the boy calmly. “‘Uttering terrorist threats intended to sow panic and dissension.' A felony under Article 15, Section 3.” He frowned. “But only in English, madam! It did not use Malay language although use of Malay is officially mandated in Singapore Constitution.”

“What did the demon say?” Laura demanded.

“‘The enemies of the righteous to burn with brimstone fire,'” the boy quoted. “‘Jah Whirlwind to smite the oppressor.' Much else in similar bloody vein. It call me by name.” He shrugged. “My mother cried.”