Islands in the Net (44 page)

She didn't mind the crudity—but the themes were amazing.

One game was called “Missile Command.” The player controlled little lumps on the screen meant to represent cities. The computer attacked them with nuclear weaponry: bombs, jets, ballistic missiles.

The machine always won—annihilating all life in a big flashy display.
Children
had once played this game. It was utterly morbid.

Then there was one called “Space Invaders.” The invading creatures were little pixeled crabs and devil dogs, UFO things from another planet. Dehumanized figures, marching down the screen in lockstep. They always won. You could slaughter them by the hundreds, even win new little forts to fire things—lasers? bombs?—but you always died in the end. The
computer
always won. It made so little sense—letting the computer win every time, as if circuitry could enjoy winning. And every effort, no matter how heroic, ended in Armageddon. It was all so eldritch, so twentieth century.

There was a third game that involved a kind of round yellow consumer—the object was to eat everything in sight, including, sometimes, the little blue pursuing enemies.

She played this game, mostly, as the level of violence was less offensive. It wasn't that she liked them much, but as the shifts passed, empty hours spinning over and over, she discovered their compulsive, obsessive quality … the careless insistence on breaking all sane bounds that was the mark of the premillennium. She played them until her hands blistered.

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: the butcher, the butcher, and the butcher.… Three sailors manned the inflatable, under a hot towering sun and a cloudless, infinite sky, on an endless flat, gentle swell of blue-green ocean. The four of them were the only people who had ever existed. And the little rubber blob of boat was the only land.

They sat hunched together, wearing shiny drawstring hooded overgarments of thin reflective foil. The foil glittered painfully in the pitiless tropic glare.

Laura pulled her hood off. She flicked at greasy strands of hair. Her hair had grown longer. Since entering the sub she had never truly managed to get it clean.

“Put your hood up,” warned sailor #1.

Laura shook her head dizzily. “I want to feel the open sky.”

“It's not good for you,” said #1, adjusting his sleeves. “With that ozone layer gone, you're asking for skin cancer in sunlight like this.”

Laura was cautious. “They say that ozone problem was mostly scare talk.”

“Oh, sure,” sneered #1. “If you take your government's word for it.” The other two sailors chuckled darkly, brief laughter evaporating into utter oceanic stillness.

“Where are we?” Laura said.

Sailor #1 looked over the side of the boat. He dipped his pale fingers into seawater and watched it drip, murmuring. “Coelacanth country …”

“What time is it?” Laura said.

“Two hours to end of Yellow shift.”

“What
day
, though?”

“I'm gonna be glad to see you go,” said sailor #2 suddenly. “You make me itch.”

Laura said nothing. A dreadful silence descended again. They were flotsam, chromed tinfoil dummies in their matte-black floating blob. She wondered how deep the ocean was beneath the film of hull.

“You always liked the Red Shift better,” said sailor #3 with sudden shocking venom. “You smiled at Red Crewmen over fifteen times. You hardly ever smiled at anyone from Yellow Crew.”

“I had no idea,” Laura said. “I'm really sorry.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure you are. Now.”

“Here comes the plane,” commented sailor #1.

Laura looked up, shading her eyes. The empty sky was full of little vision blurs, strange little artifacts of sight, trailing along with the movements of her eyeball. She wasn't sure what they were called or what made them, but it had something to do with brightness levels. Then she saw something opening in the sky, something shredding and popping and, finally, unfolding stiffly like an origami swan. Huge parafoil wings of bright life-jacket orange. It was gliding in.

Sailor #2 examined his military phone, checking for the homing signal. Sailor #3 attached a long flabby bag to a tank of hydrogen and began inflating it with a loud flatulent hissing.

Then another cargo drop, and another. Sailor #2 whooped happily. Cargo dumpsters crossed the empty sky, bus-sized brown lozenges with broad, unfolding wings of riffling dayglo-orange plastic. They reminded Laura of June bugs, fat-bellied flying beetles from Texas summer nights. They came down in broad, wheeling descent.

Their curved hulls splashed and settled with surprising, ponderous grace. Curling bow waves. Wings refolding with loud pops and creaks.

Now she could see the plane that had dumped them, a broad-winged ceramic air-bus, sky-blue beneath, its upper surfaces cut with dun-and-yellow desert camouflage. Sailor #1 switched on the inflatable's engine, and the boat mumbled its way toward the nearest cargo drop. The drop was bigger than the boat, a bulging floating cylinder, its bow and sides studded with sturdy tow rings.

Sailors #2 and #3 were fighting with the weather balloon. They let it go, and it rushed suddenly upward, uncoiling length after length of thin cable with a savage hiss.

“Okay,” said #1. He hooked the end of the cable to a series of clips on the back of Laura's life jacket. “You want to hold your knees up and in, with your arms,” he told her. “Also keep your head well down and your jaw clenched. You don't want your neck to whiplash, see, or your teeth to clack. When you feel the aircraft snag this cable, you're gonna go up in a real hurry. So just uncoil, let your legs go. Like a parachute drop.”

“I didn't know it would be like this!” Laura said anxiously. “Parachuting! I don't know how to do that!”

“Yeah,” said #2 impatiently, “but you've
seen it
, on
television
.”

“A skyhook is just the same as a para-drop, only in reverse,” said sailor #1 helpfully. He steered them to the bow of the first cargo bulk. “What do you suppose this one is?”

“New missile consignment,” said #2.

“No, man, it's the new chow. Refrigerator drop.”

“No way. That one's the fridge, over there.” He turned to Laura. “Didn't you hear a word I said? Grab your legs!”

“I—” It hit her like a car wreck. A sudden terrific jerk, as if the skyhook wanted to yank the bones from her flesh. She soared upward as if fired by a cannon, arms and knee joints wrenched and burning.

Her vision went black, the blood of acceleration draining to her feet. She was helpless, close to fainting, wind tearing furiously at her clothes. She began to twist, blue world flopping and spinning around her like an unlimited carousel. Suspended in space, she felt a sudden roaring sense of mystic ecstasy. Sublime terror, helpless awe: Sinbad yanked up by the roc of Madagascar. East of Africa. Below her, blue bed sheet of turning sea: toy boats, toy minds …

A shadow fell across her. Mighty buzz of propellers, the whine of a whirling pulley. Then she was up and inside it, in the belly of the plane. Underlit splash of daylight: stenciled boxes, crates, a spiderwebbing of steel bracing cord. An interior crane arm plucked at her cable, swung her neatly across from the cargo bay, and plunked her onto the deck. She lay there bruised and gasping.

Then the bay doors banged shut and pitch darkness fell.

She felt speed hit the plane. Now that it had her, it was climbing, putting its nose up and pouring energy into continental flight.

She was in a flying black cavern smelling of plastic and oiled tarpaulin and the sharp primal aroma of African dust. It was dark as the inside of a thermos.

She yelled. “Lights, come on!” Nothing. She heard her words echo.

She was alone. This plane had no crew. It was a giant drone, a robot.

She managed to fumble blindly out of the life jacket. She tried variants of the lighting command. She asked for general systems help, in English and Japanese. Nothing. She was cargo—no one listened to cargo.

It began to grow cold. And the air grew thin.

She was freezing. After days in the unchanging air of the sub the cold bit her like electricity. She huddled in her tinfoil survival gear. She pulled the drawstring sleeves and trouser cuffs over her hands and feet. She put her foiled hands before her face: too dark to see them, even an inch away. She covered her face with her hands and breathed into them. Icy puffs of thin Himalayan air. She curled into a ball, shivering.

Isolation and blackness and the distant trembling hum of motors.

Landing woke her. The butterfly touchdown of cybernetic precision. Then, half an hour of timeless anxiety as heat crept into the cabin and dread crept into her. Had they forgotten about her? Was she misplaced now? A computer screwup in some F.A.C.T. data-file? An annoying detail that would be shot and buried …

Creak of bay doors. White-hot light poured in. A rush, a stink of dust and fuel.

The rumble and squeak of boarding stairs. Clomp of booted feet. A man looked in, a sunburned blond European in a khaki uniform. His shirt was blackened with sweat down both sides. He spotted her where she crouched beside a tarpaulined mass of cargo.

“Come on,” he told her. He waved at her with one arm. There was a little snout of metal in his clenched fist, part of a flexible snaky thing strapped to his forearm. It had a barrel. It was a submachine gun.

“Come on,” he repeated.

Laura stood up. “Who are you? Where is this?”

“No questions.” He shook his head, bored. “Now.”

He marched her down into superheated, desiccating air. She was in a desert airport. Dust-heavy, heat-shimmered runways, low whitewashed blockhouse with a faded wind sock, a tricolor flag hanging limply: red, gold, and green. Huge white aircraft hangar in the distance, pale and barnlike, a distant angry whine of jets.

There was a van waiting, a paddy wagon, painted white like a bakery truck. Thick lugged tires, wire-reinforced windows, heavy iron bumpers.

Two black policemen opened the back of the van. They wore khaki shorts, ribbed knee-high socks, dark glasses, billy clubs, holstered pistols with rows of lead-tipped bullets. The two cops were sweating and expressionless, faces blank, radiating careless menace, calloused hands on their clubs.

She climbed into the van. Doors slammed and locked. She was alone and afraid. The rooftop metal was too hot to touch and the rubber-covered floor stank of blood and fear-sweat and a nauseating reek of dried urine.

People had died in here. Laura knew it suddenly, she could feel the presence of their dying like a weight on her heart. Death, beaten and bleeding, here on these filthy rubber mats.

The engine started and the wagon lurched into movement, and she fell.

After a while, she mustered courage and looked out the wire-netted window.

Flaming heat, flashbulb glare of sun, and dust. Round adobe huts—not even real adobe, just dried red mud—with ramshackle verandahs of plastic and tin. Filthy stretched rags throwing patches of shade. Trickles of smoke. The little domed huts were crowded thick as acne, an almighty slum stretching up slopes, down slopes, through gullies and trash heaps, as far as she could see. In the remote distance, a row of smokestacks gushed raw filth into the cloudless sky. A smelter? A refinery?

She could see people. None of them moved: they crouched stunned, torpid as lizards, in the shade of doorways and tent flaps. She could sense enormous invisible crowds of them, waiting in hot shadows for evening, for whatever passed for coolness in this godforsaken place. There were patches of raw night soil in certain crooked alleys, hard yellow sunbaked human shit, with vast explosive hordes of African flies. The flies were fierce and filthy and as big as beetles.

No paving. No ditches, no plumbing, no power. She saw a few klaxon speakers mounted on poles in the midst of the thickest slums. One rose over a fetid coffeehouse, a cobbled superhovel of plastic and crating. There were men in front of it, dozens of them, squatting on their haunches in the shade and drinking from ancient glass pop bottles and playing pebble games in the pitted dirt. Over their heads, the klaxon emitted a steady squawking rant in a language she couldn't recognize.

The men looked up as the van went past, guardedly, motionless. Their clothes were caked with filth. And they were
American
clothes: ragged souvenir T-shirts and checkered polyester pants and thick-heeled vinyl dance shoes decades out of fashion and laced with bits of wire. They wore long turbans of bright quilted rag.

The van drove on, crunching through potholes, kicking up a miasma of dust. Her bladder was bursting. She relieved herself in a corner of the truck, the one that smelled worst.

The slums failed to end. They became, if anything, thicker and more ominous. She entered an area where the men were scarred and openly carried long knives on their belts, and had shaved heads and tattoos. A group of women in greasy burlap were wailing, without much enthusiasm, over a dead boy stretched out in the doorway of his hovel.

She spotted familiar bits and pieces of the outside world, her world, which had lost a grip on reality and swirled here into hell. Burlap bags, with fading blue stencil: hands in a friendly clasp and the legend in French and English:
100% TRITICALE FLOUR, A GIFT TO THE PEOPLE OF MALI FROM THE PEOPLE OF CANADA.
A teenage boy wearing a Euro-Disney World T-shirt, with the slogan “Visit the Future!” Oil barrels, blackened with trash soot over curlicued Arabic. Pieces of a Korean pickup, plastic truck doors and windows painstakingly cemented into a wall of red mud.

Then a foul, smoke-stained lodge or church, its long, rambling walls carefully outlined in a terrifying iconography of grinning, horn-headed saints. Its sloped mud roof glittered with the round, stained-glass disks of broken bottles.

The van drove for hours. She was in the middle of a major city, a metropolis. There were hundreds of thousands living here. The entire country, Mali, a huge place, bigger than Texas—this was all that was left of it, this endless rat warren. All other choices had been stolen by the African disaster. The drought survivors crowded into gigantic urban camps, like this one. She was in Bamako, capital of Mali.