Islands in the Net (14 page)

“Well, why don't you tell her that, uh …” Laura stopped, suddenly stunned by culture shock. “I don't know where the hell I am.”

[“Are you all right, Laurita?”]

“Sure, I guess.…” She looked wildly around the strange bedroom, located the bathroom door. That would help.

When she returned she dressed quickly, then slipped on the shades. [“Ay, it's strange when the picture moves like that,”] Mrs. Rodriguez said from Laura's earplug. [“Makes me seasick!”]

“You and me both,” Laura said. “Who's David talking to out there? The so-called servants?”

[“You won't like it,”] Mrs. Rodriguez said drily. [“It's the witch girl. Carlotta.”]

“Jesus, now what?” Laura said. She picked up the squirming, bright-eyed baby and carried her into the living room. Carlotta sat on the couch; she had brought a wicker basket full of groceries. “Chow,” she announced, nodding at the food.

“Good,” Laura said. “How are you, Carlotta?”

“I'm jus' fine,” Carlotta said sunnily. “Welcome to Grenada! Real nice place you have here, I was just telling your mister.”

“Carlotta gets to be our liaison today,” David said.

“I don't mind, since Sticky's pretty busy,” Carlotta said. “Besides, I know the island, so I can tour y'all around. You want some papaya juice, Laura?”

“Okay,” Laura said. She took the other armchair, feeling restless, wanting to run on the beach. No chance for that though, not here. She balanced Loretta on her knee. “So the Bank trusts you to show us around?”

“I'm wired for sound,” Carlotta said, pouring. A light pair of earphones circled her neck, trailing wire to a telephone on her studded belt. She wore a short-sleeved cotton top, with eight inches of bare freckled stomach between it and her red leather miniskirt. “Y'all gotta be a little careful of the food around here,” Carlotta said. “They got
houngans
on this island that can really fuck you up.”

“‘Houngans?'” David said. “You mean those designer drug people?”

“Yeah, them. They got voodoo poisons here that can do stuff to your CNS that I wouldn't do to a Pentagon Chief of Staff! They ship those mad doctors in, high bio-techies, and kind of crossbreed 'em with those old blowfish-poison zombie masters, and they come out mean as a junkyard dog!” She passed Laura a glass of juice. “If I was in Singapore right now, I'd be burnin' joss!”

Laura stared unhappily into her glass. “Oh, you're fine and safe with me,” Charlotta said. “I bought all this in the market myself.”

“Thanks, that's very thoughtful,” David said.

“Well, us Texans gotta stick together!” Charlotta reached for the basket. “Y'all can try some of these little tamale things, ‘pastels' they call 'em. They're like little curries in pastry. Indian food. East Indians I mean, they snuffed all the local Indians a long time ago.”

[“Don't eat it!”] Mrs. Rodriquez protested. Laura ignored her. “They're good,” she said, munching.

“Year, they chased 'em off Sauteur's Point, Leaper's Point that means,” Carlotta said to David. “The Carib Indians. They knew the Grenada settlers had their number, so they all jumped off a cliff into the sea together, and died. That's where we're going today—Sauteur's Point. I got a car outside.”

After breakfast they took Carlotta's car. It was a longer, truck version of the Brazilian three-wheelers, with a kind of motorcycle grip for manual driving. “I like manual driving,” Carlotta confessed as they got in. “High speed, that's a big premillennium kick.” She beeped merrily with a thumb button as they rolled past the guards at the gate. The guards waved; they seemed to know her. Carlotta gunned her engine, spraying gravel down the weaving hillside road, until they hit the highway.

“You think it's safe to leave the household slaveys with our gear?” Laura asked David.

David shrugged. “I woke 'em up and put 'em to work. Rita's weeding the roses, Jimmy's cleaning the pool, and Rajiv gets to strip the fountain pump.”

Laura laughed.

David cracked his knuckles, his eyes clouded with anticipation. “When we get back, we can hit it a lick ourselves.”

“You want to work on the house?”

David looked surprised. “A great old place like that? Hell, yes! Can't just let it rot!”

The highway was busier in daylight, lots of rusting old Toyotas and Datsuns. Cars inched past a construction bottleneck, where a pick-and-shovel crew were killing time, sitting in the shade of their steamroller. The crew stared at Carlotta, grinning, as she inched the three-wheeler past. “Hey darleeng!” one of them crowed, waving.

Suddenly a canvas-topped military truck appeared from the north. The crew grabbed their picks and shovels and set to with a will. The truck rumbled past them on the road's shoulder—it was full of bored-looking NMM militia.

A mile later, they passed a town called Grand Roy. “I stay at the Church here,” Carlotta said, waving her arm as the engine sputtered wildly. “It's a nice little temple, local girls, they have funny ideas about the Goddess but we're bringin' 'em around.”

Cane fields, nutmeg orchards, blue mountains off to the west whose volcanic peaks cut a surf of cloud. They passed two more towns, bigger ones: Gouyave, Victoria. Crowded sidewalks with black women in garish tropical prints, a few women in Indian saris; the ethnic groups didn't seem to mix much. Not many children, but lots of khaki-clad militia. In Victoria they drove past a bazaar, where weird choking music gushed from chest-high sidewalk speakers, their owners sitting behind fiberboard tables stacked high with tapes and videos. Shoppers jostled coconut vendors and old men shoving popsicle carts. High on the walls, out of reach of scribblers, old AIDS posters warned against deviant sex-acts in stiffly accurate health-agency prose.

After Victoria they turned west, circling the shoreline at the northern tip of the island. The land began to rise.

Red loading cranes sketched the horizon over Point Sauteur, like skeletal, sky-etching filigree. Laura thought again of the red radio towers with their eerie leaping lights.… She reached for David's hand. He squeezed it and smiled at her, below the glasses; but she couldn't meet his eyes.

Then they were over a hill and suddenly they could see all of it. A vast maritime complex sprawled offshore, like a steel magnate's version of Venice, all sharp metallic angles and rising fretworks and greenish water webbed with floating cables.… Long protective jetties of white jumbled boulders, stretching north for miles, spray leaping here and there against their length, the inner waters calmed by fields of orange wave-breaker buoys.…

“Mrs. Rodriguez,” David said calmly. “We need an oceaneering tech online. Tell Atlanta.”

[“Okay David, right away.”]

Laura counted thirty major installations standing offshore. They were full of people. Most of them were old jackup oil-drilling rigs, their fretted legs standing twenty stories tall, their five-story bases towering high above the water. Martian giants, their knees surrounded by loading docks and small moored barges. Grenada's tropic sunlight gleamed fitfully from aluminum sleeping cabins the size and shape of mobile homes, seeming as small as toys aboard their rigs.

A pair of round, massive OTECS chugged placidly, sucking hot seawater to power their ammonia boilers. Octopus nests of floating cables led from the power stations to rigs piled high with green-and-yellow tangles of hydraulics.

They pulled off the highway. Carlotta pointed: “That's where they jumped!” The cliffs of Point Sauteur were only forty feet high, but the rocks below them looked nasty enough. They would have looked better with raging romantic breakers, but the jetties and wave baffles had turned this stretch of sea into a mud-colored simmering soup. “On a clear day you can see Carriacou from the cliffs,” Carlotta said. “Lot of amazing stuff out on that little island—it's part of Grenada, too.”

She parked the three-wheeler on a strip of white gravel beside a drydock. Inside the drydock, blue-white arc welders spat brilliance. They left the car.

A sea breeze crept onshore, stinking of ammonia and urea. Carlotta threw her arms back and inhaled hugely. “Fertilizer plants,” Carlotta said. “Like the old days on the Gulf Coast, huh?”

“My granddad used to work in those,” David said. “The old refinery complexes … you remember those, Carlotta?”

“
Remember
'em?” She laughed. “These
are
them, I reckon. They got all this dead tech dirt cheap—bought it, abandoned in place.” She slipped on her earphones and listened. “Andrei's waiting … he can explain for y'all. C'mon.”

They walked under the shadows of towering cranes, up the limestone steps of a seawall, down to the waterfront. A deeply tanned blond man sat on the stone dock, drinking coffee with a pair of Grenadian longshoremen. All three men wore loose cotton blouses, multipocketed jeans, hard hats, and steel-toed deck shoes.

“At last, here they are,” said the blond man, rising. “Hello, Carlotta. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Webster. And this must be your little baby. What a cute little chicken.” He touched the baby's nose with a grease-stained forefinger. The baby gurgled at him and gave him her best toothless smile.

“My name is Andrei Tarkovsky,” the technician said. “I was from Poland.” He looked at his dirty hands apologetically. “Forgive me for not shaking.”

“S'okay,” David said.

“They have asked me to show you some of what we do here.” He waved at the end of the pier. “I have a boat.”

The boat was a twelve-foot swamp runner with a blunt prow and a water-jet outboard. Andrei handed them life jackets, including a small one for the baby. They belted up. Loretta, amazingly, took it cheerfully. They climbed down a short ladder onto the boat.

David sat in the stern. Laura and the baby took the bow, facing backward, sitting on a padded thwart. Carlotta sprawled in the bottom. Andrei shoved off and thumbed the engine on. They scudded north over the slimy water.

David turned to Andrei and said something about catalytic cracking units. At that moment a new voice came online. [“Hello Rizome-Grenada, this is Eric King in San Diego.… Could you give me another look at that distillation unit.… No, you, Laura, look at the big yellow thing—”]

“I'll take it,” Laura shouted to David, putting her hand over her ear. “Eric, where is it you want me to look?”

[“To your left—yeah—Jeez, I haven't seen one like that in twenty years.… Could you give me just a straight, slow scan from right to left.… Yeah, that's great.”] He fell silent as Laura panned across the horizon.

Andrei and David were already arguing. “Yes, but you pay for feedstocks,” Andrei told David passionately. “Here we have power from ocean thermals”—he waved at a chugging OTEC—“which is free. Ammonia is NH3. Nitrogen from the air, which is free. Hydrogen from the seawater, which is free. All it costs is capital investment.”

[“Yeah, and maintenance,”] Eric King said sourly. “Yeah, and maintenance,” Laura said loudly.

“Is not a problem, with the modern polymers,” Andrei said smoothly. “Inert resins … we paint them on … reduce corrosion almost to nothing. You must be familiar with these.”

“Expensive,” David said.

“Not for us,” Andrei said. “We manufacture them.”

He piloted them below a jackleg rig. When they crossed the sharp demarcation of its shadow, Andrei cut the engine. They drifted on; the rig's flat, two-acre flooring, riddled with baroque plumbing, rose twenty feet above the shadowed water. At a sea-level floating dock, a dreadlocked longshoreman looked them over coolly, his face framed in headphones.

Andrei guided them to one of the rig's four legs. Laura could see the thick painted sheen of polymer on the great load-bearing pipes and struts. There were no barnacles at the waterline. No seaweed, no slime. Nothing grew on this structure. It was slick as ice.

David turned to Andrei, waving his hands animately. Carlotta slouched in the bottom of the boat and dangled her feet over the side, smiling up at the bottom of the rig.

[“I wanted to mention that my brother, Michael King, stayed in your Lodge last year,”] King said online. [“He spoke really highly of it.”]

“Thanks, that's nice to know,” Laura said into the air. David was talking to Andrei, something about copper poisoning and embedded biocides. He ignored King, turning down the volume on his earpiece.

[“I've been following this Grenadian affair. Under the awful circumstances, you've been doing well.”]

“We appreciate that support and solidarity, Eric.”

[“My wife agrees with me on this—though she thinks the Committee could have managed better.… You're supporting the Indonesian, right? Suvendra?”]

Laura paused. She hadn't thought of the Committee elections in a while. Emily supported Suvendra. “Yeah, that's right.”

[“What about Pereira?”]

“I like Pereira, but I'm not sure he has the stuff,” Laura said. Carlotta grinned to see her, like an idiot, muttering into midair at an unseen presence. Schizoid. Laura frowned. Too much input at once. With her eyes and ears wired on separate realities, her brain felt divided on invisible seams, everything going slightly waxy and unreal. She was getting Net-burned. [“Okay, I know Pereira blew it in Brasilia, but he's honest. What about Suvendra and this Islamic Bank business? That doesn't bother you?”]

David, still rapt in conversation with the emigré Pole, stopped suddenly and put his hand to his ear. “Islamic Bank business,” Laura thought, with a little cold qualm. Of course. Someone from Rizome was negotiating with the Singapore data pirates. And of course, it would be Suvendra. It fell neatly into place: Ms. Emerson, and Suvendra, and Emily Donato. The Rizome old girls' network in action.

“Um … Eric,” David said aloud. “This is not a private line.”