Islands in the Net (16 page)

Laura hesitated. “Okay.” Carlotta smiled as Laura handed her the tote. She slung its strap over her shoulder. “Hello, Loretta,” she cooed, poking at the baby. Loretta looked up at her doubtfully and decided to let it pass.

They stepped through a hatch door, with rounded corners and a rubber seal, into the fluorescent lights of a hall. Lots of old scratched teak, scuffed linoleum. The walls were hung with stuff—“People's Art,” Laura guessed, lots of child-bright tropical reds and golds and greens, dreadlocked men and women reaching toward a slogan-strewn blue sky.…

“This is the bridge,” Andrei announced. It looked like a television studio, dozens of monitor screens, assorted cryptic banks of knobs and switches, a navigator's table with elbowed lamps and cradled telephones. Through a glassed-in wall above the monitors, the deck of the ship stretched out like a twenty-four-lane highway. There were little patches of ocean, way, way down there, looking too distant to matter much. Glancing through the windows, Laura saw that there were a pair of big cargo barges on the supertanker's port side. They'd been completely hidden before, by the sheer rising bulk of the ship. The barges pumped their loads aboard through massive ribbed pipelines. There was a kind of uneasy nastiness to the sight, vaguely obscene, like the parasitic sexuality of certain deep-sea fish.

“Don't you wanna look?” Carlotta asked her, swinging the baby back and forth at her hip. Andrei and David were already deeply engrossed, examining gauges and talking a mile a minute. Really absorbing topics, too, like protein fractionation and slipstream turbulence. A ship's officer was helping explain, one of the bigwigs with multiple pens. He looked weird: velvety black skin and straight blond flaxen hair. “This is more David's sort of thing,” Laura said.

“Well, could you go offline for a second, then?”

“Huh?” Laura paused. “Anything you want to tell me, you ought to be able to tell Atlanta.”

“You gotta be kidding,” Carlotta said, rolling her eyes. “What's the deal, Laura? We talked private all the time at the Lodge, and nobody bothered us then.”

Laura considered. “What do you think, online?”

[“Well, hell, I trust you,”] King said. [“Go for it! You're in no danger that I can see.”]

“Well … okay, as long as David's here to watch over me.” Laura stepped to the navigator's table, took off her videoglasses and earplug, and set them down. She backed away and rejoined Carlotta, careful to stay in view of the glasses. “There. Okay?”

“You've got really strange eyes, Laura,” Carlotta murmured. “Kind of yellow-green.… I'd forgotten how they looked. It's easier to talk to you when you don't have that rig on—kinda makes you look like a bug.”

“Thanks a lot,” Laura said. “Maybe you ought to take it a little easy on the hallucinogens.”

“What's this high-and-mighty stuff?” Carlotta said. “This grandmother of yours, Loretta Day, that you think so much of—she got busted for drugs once. Didn't she?”

Laura was startled. “What's my grandmother got to do with it?”

“Only that she raised you, and looked after you, not like your real mother. And I know you thought a lot of old granny.” Carlotta tossed her hair, pleased at Laura's look of shock. “We know all about you … and her … and David.… The farther you go back, the easier it is to sneak the records out. 'Cause no one's keeping guard on all the data. There's just too much of it to watch, and no one really cares! But the Bank does—so they've got it all.”

Carlotta narrowed her eyes. “Marriage certificates—divorces—charge cards, names, addresses, phones.… Newspapers, scanned over twenty, thirty years, by computers, for every single mention of your name.… I've seen their dossier on you. On Laura Webster. All kinds of photos, tapes, hundreds of thousands of words.” Carlotta paused. “It's really weird.… I know you so well, I feel like I'm inside your head, in a way. Sometimes I know what you'll say even before you say it, and it makes me laugh.”

Laura felt herself flush. “I can't stop you from invading my privacy. Maybe that gives you an unfair advantage over me. But I don't make final decisions—I'm only representing my people.” A group of officers broke up around one of the screens, leaving the bridge with looks of stern devotion to duty. “Why are you telling me this, Carlotta?”

“I'm not sure …” Carlotta said, looking genuinely puzzled, even a little hurt. “I guess it's cause I don't want to see you walk blind into what's coming down for you. You think you're safe cause you work for the Man, but the Man's had his day. The real future's here, in this place.” Carlotta lowered her voice and stepped closer; she was serious. “You're on the wrong side, Laura. The losin' side, in the long run. These people have hold of things that the Man don't want trifled with. But there's not a thing the Man can do about it, really. Cause they got his number. And they can do things here that straights are scared to even think about.”

Laura rubbed her left ear, a little sore from its plug-in phone. “You're really impressed by that black market tech, Carlotta?”

“Sure, there's that,” Carlotta said, shaking her tousled head. “But they got Louison, the Prime Minister. He can raise up his Optimals. He can call 'em out, Laura—his Personas, understand? They walk around in broad daylight, while he never leaves that old fort. I've seen 'em … walkin' the streets of the capital … little old men.” Carlotta shivered.

Laura stared at Carlotta with mixed annoyance and pity. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Don't you know what an Optimal Persona is? It's got no substance, time and distance mean nothing to it. It can look and listen … spy on you.… Or maybe walk right through your body! And two days later you drop dead without a mark on you.”

Laura sighed; Carlotta had had her going for a moment there. She could understand outlaw tech; but mystic bullshit had never done much for her. David and the Polish emigré were going over a CAD-CAM readout, all smiles. “Does Andrei believe all this?”

Carlotta shrugged, her face closing up, becoming distant again. “Andrei's a political. We get all kinds in Grenada.… But it all adds up in the end.”

“Maybe it does … if you're batshit.”

Carlotta gave her a look of pious sorrow. “I better put my rig back on,” Laura said.

They had lunch with the ship's captain. He was the potbellied character with the six gold pens. His name was Blaize. Nineteen of the ship's other commissars joined him in the supertanker's cavernous dining room, with its hinged chandeliers and oak wainscoting. They dined off old gold-rimmed china with the insignia of the P&O Shipping Line and were served by teenage waiters in uniform, hauling big steel tureens. They ate scop. Various hideous forms of it. Soups. Nutmeg-flavored mock chicken breast. Little fricasseed things with toothpicks in them.

Eric King didn't wait through lunch. He signed offline, leaving them with Mrs. Rodriguez.

“We are by no means up to capacity,” Captain Blaize announced in a clipped Caribbean drawl. “But we come, by and by, a little closer to the production quotas each and every month. By this action, we relieve the strain on Grenada's productive soil … and its erosion … and the overcrowding as well, you understand, Mr. Webster.…” Blaize's voice drifted through a singsong cadence, causing strange waves of glazed ennui to course through Laura's brain. “Imagine, Mr. Webster, what a fleet of ships, like this, could do, for the plight of Mother Africa.”

“Yeah. I mean, I grasp the implications,” David said, digging into his scop with gusto.

Light background music was playing. Laura listened with half an ear. Some kind of slick premillennium crooner on vocals, lots of syrupy strings and jazzy razzing saxophones … “(something something) for you, dear … buh buh buh boooh …” She could almost identify the singer … from old movies. Cosby, that was it. Bing Cosby.

Now digitizing effects started creeping in and something awful began to happen. Suddenly a bandersnatch had jumped into Cosby's throat. His jovial white-guy Anglo good vibes stretched like electric taffy—
arrooooh
, werewolf noises. Now Bing was making ghastly
hub hub hub
backward croonings, like a sucking chest wound. The demented noise was filtering around the diners but no one was paying attention.

Laura turned to the young three-pen cadre on her left. The guy was waving his fingers over Loretta's tote and looked up guiltily when she asked. “The music? We call it didge-Ital … dig-ital, seen, D.J.Ital.… Mash it up right on the ship.” Yeah. They were doing something awful to poor old Bing while he wasn't looking. He sounded like his head was made of sheet metal.

Now Blaize and Andrei were lecturing David about money. The Grenadian rouble. Grenada had a closed, cash-free economy; everybody on the island had personal credit cards, drawn on the bank. This policy kept that “evil global currency,” the ecu, out of local circulation. And that “razored off the creeping tentacles” of the Net's “financial and cultural imperialism.”

Laura listened to their crude P.R. with sour amusement. They wouldn't crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought. It was clear that the Bank kept the whole population's credit transactions on file, just so they could look over everybody's shoulders. But that was Orwell stuff. Even bad old Mao and Stalin couldn't make that kind of crap work out.

David raised his brows innocently and asked about “left-hand payments,” an old tag line from East Bloc premillennium days. Andrei got a stiff and virtuous look on his face. Laura hid her smile with a forkful of mock carrots. She'd bet anything that a wad of paper ecu, under the table, would buy the average Grenadian body and soul. Yeah, it was just like those old-time Russki hustlers, who used to pester tourists in Moscow for dollars, back when there were dollars. Big fleas had little fleas, big black markets had little black markets. Funny!

Laura felt pleased, sure she was on to something. Tonight she'd have to write Debra Emerson in Atlanta, on an encrypted line, and tell her: yeah, Debra, here's a place to stick a crowbar. Debra'd know how, too: it was just like bad old CIA work before the Abolition.… What did they used to call it? Destabilization.

“It's not like the Warsaw Pact, before openness,” continued Andrei, shaking his handsome blond head. “Our island is more like little OPEC country—Kuwait, Abu Dhabi.… Too much easy money eats the social values, makes life like Disneyland, all fat Cadillacs and the cartoon mouses … empty, meaningless.”

Blaize smiled a little, his eyes half closed, like a dreadlocked Buddha. “Without Movement discipline,” he rumbled smoothly, “our money would flow back, like water downhill … from the Third World periphery, down to the centers of the Net. Your ‘free market' cheats us; it's a Babylon slave market in truth! Babylon would drain away our best people, too … they would go to where the phones already work, where the streets are already paved. They want the infrastructure, where the Net is woven thickest, and it's easiest to prosper. It is a vicious cycle, making Third World sufferation.”

“But today the adventure is here!” Andrei broke in, leaning forward. “No more frontiers in your America, David, my friend! Today it's all lawyers and bureaucrats and ‘social impact statements'.…”

Andrei sneered and slapped his fork on the tabletop. “Huge prison walls of paperwork to crush the life and hope from modern pioneers! Just as ugly, just such a crime, as the old Berlin Wall, David. Only more clever, with better public relations.” He glanced at Laura, sidelong. “Scientists and engineers, and architects, too, yes—we brothers, David, who do the world's true work—where is our freedom? Where, eh?”

Andrei paused, tossing his head to flick back a loose wing of blond hair. Suddenly he had the dramatic look of an orator on a roll, a man drawing inspiration from deep wells of sincerity. “We have no freedom! We cannot follow our dreams, our visions. Governments and corporations break us to their harness! For them, we make only colored toothpaste, softer toilet paper, bigger TVs to stupefy the masses!” He chopped air with his hands. “It's an old man's world today, with old man's values! With soft, cozy padding on all the sharp corners, with ambulances always standing by. Life is more than this, David. Life has to be more than this!”

The ship's officers had stopped to listen. As Andrei paused, they nodded among themselves. “I-rey, mon, star righteous.…” Laura watched them trade sturdy looks of macho comradeship. The air felt syrup-thick with their ship crew's
gemeineschaft
, reinforced by the Party line. It felt familiar to Laura, like the good community feeling at a Rizome meeting, but stronger, less rational. Militant—and scary, because it felt so good. It tempted her.

She sat quietly, trying to relax, to see through their eyes and feel and understand. Andrei blazed on, hitting his stride now, preaching about the Genuine Needs of the People, the social role of the Committed Technician. It was a mishmash: Food, and Liberty, and Meaningful Work. And the New Man and New Woman, with their hearts with the people, but their eyes on the stars.… Laura watched the crew. What must they be feeling? Young, most of them; the committed Movement elite, taken from those sleepy little island towns into a place like this. She imagined them running up and down the deck stairs of their strange steel world, hot and fervid, like hoppedup lab rats. Sealed in a bottle and drifting away from the Net's laws and rules and standards.

Yeah. So many changes, so many shocks and novelties; they broke people up inside. Dazzled by potential, they longed to throw out the rules and limits, all the checks and balances—all discredited now, all lies of the old order. Sure, Laura thought. This was why Grenada's cadres could chop genes like confetti, rip off data for their Big Brother dossiers, and never think twice. When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.