Islands in the Net (33 page)

Flame poured out of it.

It exploded wetly. A grotesque air-burst of steam and stink, spattering the crowd. It flopped to the pavement, dead instantly, a bag of burning flesh. Threads of impossible heat glimmered in it …

Laura was running.

The Tamil had her by the wrist. The crowd was running, everywhere, nowhere, into the streets where taxis screeched to sudden halts with robot honks of protest.… “In here,” the Tamil said helpfully, jumping into a cab.

It was silent inside the cab, air-conditioned. It took a right at the first curb and left the bank behind. The Tamil released her wrist, leaned back, smiled at her.

“Thanks,” Laura said, rubbing her arm. “Thanks a lot, sir.”

“No problem, la,” the Tamil said. “The cab waiting for me.” He paused, then tapped his cast with the cane. “My leg, you see.”

Laura took a deep breath, shuddered. Half a block passed as she got a grip on herself. The Tamil looked her over, his eyes bright. He'd moved very fast for an injured man—he'd almost sprained her wrist, dragging her. “If you hadn't stopped me, I'd still be running,” she told him gratefully. “You're very brave.”

“So are you,” he said.

“Not me, no way,” she said. She was trembling.

The Tamil seemed to think it was funny. He nudged his chin with the head of his cane. A languid, dandyish gesture. “Madam, you were fighting in the street with two big data pirates.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “That. That's nothing.” She paused, embarrassed. “Thanks for taking my part, though.”

“‘An integrationist,'” the Tamil quoted. He was mimicking her. He looked down deliberately. “Oh, look—the nasty voodoo spoilt your nice coat.”

There was a foul splattered blob on Laura's raincoat sleeve. Red, glistening. She gasped in revulsion and tried to shrug her way out of it. Her arms were caught behind her.…

“Here,” the Tamil said, smiling, as if to help. He held something under her nose. She heard a snap.

A wave of giddy heat touched her face. Then, without warning, she passed out.

A sudden sharp reek dug into Laura's head. Ammonia. Her eyes watered. “Lights …” she croaked.

The overheads dimmed to murky amber. She felt old, sick, like hours had marched through her on hangover feet. She was half-buried in something—she struggled, sudden claustrophobic rush …

She was lying in a beanbag chair. Like something her grandmother might have owned. The room around her was bluish with the grainy light of televisions.

“You back to the land of the living, Blondie.”

Laura shook her head hard. Her nose and throat felt scorched. “I'm …” She sneezed, painfully. “Goddamn it!” She got her elbows into the shifting pellets of the beanbag and levered herself up.

The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table. The smell of it, ginger and prawns, made her stomach tighten painfully. “Is that you?” she said at last.

He looked down at her. “Who you thinkin', eh?”

“Sticky?”

“Yeah,” he said, with the chin-swiveling nod of the Tamils. “I and righteous I.”

Laura knuckled her eyes. “Sticky, you're really different this time … your goddamn
cheeks
are all wrong and your skin … your hair.… You don't even
sound
the same.”

He grunted.

She sat up. “What the hell have they done to you?”

“Trade secrets,” Sticky said.

Laura looked around. The room was small and dark, and it stank. Bare plywood shelving weighted down with tape cassettes, canvas bags, frazzled spools of wiring. Heaps of polyurethane sheeting, and styrofoam noodles, and tangled cellulose.

A bolted wall rack held a dozen cheap Chinese televisions, alive with flickering Singapore street scenes. Against the other wall were heaped dozens of eviscerated cardboard boxes: bright commercial colors, American cornflakes, Kleenex, laundry soap. Gallon paint cans, tubing, rolls of duct tape. Someone had tacked swimsuit shots of Miss Ting inside the grimy kitchenette.

It was hot. “Where the hell are we?”

“Don't ask,” Sticky said.

“This
is
Singapore, though, right?” She glanced at her bare wrist. “What time is it?”

Sticky held up the smashed wreckage of her watchphone. “Sorry. Nah sure I could trust it.” He gestured across the table. “Take a seat, memsahib.” He grinned tiredly. “You, I trust.”

Laura got to her feet and made it to the second chair. She leaned on the table. “You know something? I'm goddamn glad to see you. I don't know why, but I am.”

Sticky shoved her the remnants of his food. “Here, eat. You been out a while.” He scrubbed his plastic fork on a paper napkin and gave it to her.

“Thanks. There a ladies' room in this dump?”

“Over there,” he nodded. “You feel a sting, back at the Bank? You be sure to check you legs for pinholes in there.”

The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. She had wet herself while unconscious—not badly, luckily, and the stains didn't show through her Grenadian jeans. She mopped herself with paper and came back. “No pinholes, Captain.”

“Good,” he said, “I'm happy I don't have to dig one of those Bulgarian pellets out of you ass. What the fock you doin' in that Bank crowd, anyway?”

“Trying to call David,” she said, “after you screwed up the phones.”

Sticky laughed. “Why you nah have the sense to stay with your Bwana? He nah as stupid as he look—have the sense not to be here, anyway.”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“Having the time of my life,” he said. “The last time, maybe.” He rubbed his nose—they'd done something to his nostrils, too; they were narrower. “Ten years they train me for something like this. But now I'm here and doin' it, it's …”

It seemed to drift away from him then, and he shrugged and waved it past. “I see your testimony, right? Some of it. Too late, but at least you tell them the same things you tell us. Same in Galveston, same in Grenada, same here, same everywhere for you, nah?”

“That's right, Captain.”

“That's good,” he said vaguely. “Y'know, wartime … mostly, you do nothing. Time to think … meditate … Like down at the Bank, we
know
those fockin' bloodclots hurry down there when the phones shut down, and we
know
they be just like those bloodclots we got, but to
see
them … see it happen like that, so predictable …”

“Like wind-up toys,” Laura said. “Like bugs … like they just don't matter at all.”

He looked at her, surprised. She felt surprised herself. It had been easy to say, sitting there together with him in the darkness. “Yeah,” he said. “Like toys. Like wind-up toys pretending to have souls.… It's a wind-up city, this place. Full of lying and chatter and bluff, and cash registers ringin' round the clock. It's Babylon. If there ever was a Babylon, it's here.”

“I thought
we
were Babylon,” Laura said. “The Net, I mean.”

Sticky shook his head. “These people are more like you than you ever were.”

“Oh,” Laura said slowly. “Thanks, I guess.”

“You wouldn't do what they did to Grenada,” he said.

“No. But I don't think it was them, Sticky.”

“Maybe it wasn't,” he said. “But I don't care. I hate them. For what they are, for what they want to be. For what they want to make of the world.”

Sticky's accent had wavered, from Tamil to Islands patois. Now it vanished completely into flat Net English. “You can burn down a country with toys, if you know how. It shouldn't be true, but it is. You can knock the heart and soul out of people. We know it in Grenada, as well as they do here. We know it better.”

He paused. “All that Movement talk your David thought was cute, cadres and feed the people.… Come the War, it's gone. Just like that. In that madhouse under Fedon's Camp, they're all chewing on each other's guts. I know I'm getting my orders from that fucker Castleman. That fat hacker, who's got no real-life at all—just a
screen
. It's all
principles
now. Tactics and strategy. Like someone
has
to do this, doesn't matter where or who, just to prove it's possible.…”

He bent in his chair and rubbed his bare leg, briefly. The cast was gone now, but there were buckle marks on his shin. “They planned this thing in Fedon's Camp,” he said. “This demon thing, Demonstration Project.… They been working under there for twenty years, Laura, they've got tech like …
not human
. I didn't know about it—
nobody
knew about it. I can do things to this city—me, just a few brother soldiers smuggled in, not many—things you can't
imagine
.”

“Voodoo,” Laura said.

“That's right. With the tech they gave us, I can do things you can't tell from magic.”

“What are your orders?”

He stood up suddenly. “You're not in them.” He walked into the kitchenette and opened the rust-spotted refrigerator.

There was a book on the table, a thick looseleaf pamphlet. No spine, no title. Laura picked it up and opened it. Page after page of smudgy Xerox:
The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency
by Colonel Jonathan Gresham.

“Who's Jonathan Gresham?” she said.

“He's a genius,” Sticky said. He came back to the table with a carton of yogurt. “That's not for you to read. Don't even look. If Vienna knew you'd touched that book, you'd never see daylight again.”

She set it down carefully. “It's just a book.”

Sticky barked with laughter. He started shoveling yogurt into his mouth with the pinched look of a little boy eating medicine. “You see Carlotta lately?”

“Not since the airport in Grenada.”

“You gonna leave this place? Go back home?”

“I sure as hell want to. Officially, I'm not through testifying in Parliament. I want to know their decision on information policy.…”

He shook his head. “We'll take care of Singapore.”

“No, you won't,” she said. “No matter what you can do, you'll only drive the data bankers underground. I want them out in the open—everything out in the open. Where everyone can deal with it honestly.”

Sticky said nothing. He was breathing hard suddenly, looking greenish. Then he belched and opened his eyes. “You and your people—you're staying on the waterfront, in Anson District.”

“That's right.”

“Where that Anti-Labour fool, Rashak …”

“Dr. Razak, yes, that's his electoral district.”

“Okay,” he said. “Razak's people, we can let them alone. Let him run this town, if there's anything left of it. Stay there and you'll be safe. Understand?”

Laura thought it over. “What is it you want from me?”

“Nothing. Just go home. If they'll let you.”

There was a moment of silence. “You gonna eat that, or what?” Sticky said at last. Laura realized that she had picked up the plastic fork. She'd been bending it in her fingers, over and over, as if it were glued to her hand.

She set it down. “What's a ‘Bulgarian pebble,' Sticky?”

“‘Pellet,'” Sticky said. “Old Bulgarian KGB use 'em long ago. Tiny lickle piece of steel, holes drilled in, and sealed with wax. Stick it in a man, wax melts from his body heat, poison inside, ricin mostly, good strong venom.… Not what we use.”

“What?” Laura said.

“Carboline. Wait.” He left the table, opened a kitchen cabinet, and pulled out a sealed bubble pack. Inside it was a flat black plastic cartridge. “Here.”

She looked it over. “What's this? A printer ribbon?”

“We wire 'em up to the taxis,” Sticky said. “Has a spring gun inside, twenty, thirty pellets of carboline. When the taxi spots a man in the street, sometimes the gun fires. An unmanned taxi is easy to steal and rig. The taxis outside that bank were full of these toys. Carboline is a brain drug, it makes
terror
. Terror in his blood, slow, steady leak, to last for days and days! Why work to terrorize some fool when you can just
terrorize
him, simple and sweet?”

Sticky laughed. He was beginning to talk a little faster now. “That Yankee Jap in the line ahead of you, he's gonna toss, and turn, and sweat, and dream bad dreams. I could have killed him, just as easy, with venom. He could be dead right now, but why kill a flesh, when I can touch a soul? For everyone around him now, he'll talk dread and fear, dread and fear, just like burning meat stinks.”

“You shouldn't tell me this,” Laura said.

“Because you have to go tell the government, don't you?” Sticky sneered. “You do that for me, go ahead! There are twelve thousand taxis in Singapore, and after you tell it, they have to search every damn one! Too much work to wreck their transport system, when we can get they own cops to do it for us! Don't forget to say this too: we rig their magnet trains. And we got plenty more such lickle guns left.”

She set it down on the table. Carefully. As if it were made from spun glass.

The words began to tumble from him. “By now they know that sticky gum their boss man, Kim, touched.” He pointed. “You see those paint cans?” He laughed. “Evening gloves comin' back to fashion in Singapore! Raincoats and surgery masks, those are smart, too!”

“That's enough!”

“You don't want to hear about the paper-clip mines?” Sticky demanded. “How cheap they are, to blow a fockin' leg off at the knee!” He slammed his fist into the table. “Don't you cry at me!”

“I'm not crying!”

“What's that on you face then?” He lurched to his feet, kicking back his chair. “Tell me you cry when they haul me out of here dead!”

“Don't!”