Islands in the Net (27 page)

“Then why aren't they doing it?” Yoshio said.

“Well,” David said uneasily, “I guess it's like the U.N. used to be. A good idea, but when it comes down to it, no sovereign government really wants to—”

“
Exactamente
,” Yoshio said. “No
government
. But
we
could be very happy with a global police force. And Vienna is global.
Un grupo nuevo-millennario
. Just like a modern
keiretsu
.”

Laura shoved her plate away, struggling with her Japanese. “Vienna exists to protect ‘the political order.' To protect governments. They don't belong to us. Corporations can't sign diplomatic treaties.”

“Why not?” Yoshio said bluntly. “A treaty is only a contract. You're talking like my grandmother. It's our world now. Now there's a tiger loose in it! A tiger we made—because we foolishly paid other people to be the claws and teeth of our corporations.”

“Who bells the cat?” said Mika in English. She poured fresh sake into the little electric kettle.

Yoshio laughed at them. “Such long faces. Why be so shocked? You were acting as Rizome diplomats already—subverting Grenada for your corporate politics. Don't be so—what's the world? Inscrutable! Be more modern!” He stretched out his kimono'd arms. “Grab the problem with both hands.”

“I don't see how that's possible,” Laura said.

“It's very possible,” Yoshio said. “Kymera and Farben have studied this problem. With help from other allies, such as your Rizome, we could multiply Vienna's budget many times, quickly. We could hire many mercenaries and put them under Vienna's command. We could launch a sudden attack on Mali and kill the tiger immediately.”

“Is that legal?” David said.

Yoshio shrugged. “Who do you ask? Who makes that decision? Governments like America? Or Japan? Or Mali or Grenada? Or do we decide, instead? Let's vote.” He raised his hand. “I say it's legal.”

Mika raised her hand. “Me too.”

“How long can we wait?” Yoshio said. “The Free Army attacked a little island, but it could have been Manhattan Island. Should we wait for that?”

“But you're talking about bribing the global police,” Laura said. “That sounds like a coup d'état!”

“‘Kudetah?'” Yoshio said, blinking. He shrugged. “Why work through governments anymore? Let us cut out the middleman.”

“But Vienna would never agree. Would they?”

“Why not? Without us, they will never be a true global army.”

“Let me get this straight,” Laura said. “You're talking about a corporate army, without any legal national backing, invading sovereign nations?”

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mika said. She rose gracefully and began clearing dinner away.

Yoshio smiled. “Modern governments are weak. We have
made
them weak. Why pretend otherwise? We can play them against one another. They need us worse than we need them.”

“
Traicion
,” David said. “Treason.”

“Call it a labor strike,” Yoshio suggested.

“But by the time you got all your corporations together,” Laura said, “government police would be arresting your conspirators right and left.”

“It is a little race, isn't it?” Yoshio observed brightly. “But let us see who controls the Vienna police. They will do much arresting before this is over. The bureaucrats call us ‘traitors'? We can call them ‘terrorist sympathizers.'”

“But you're talking global revolution!”

“Call it ‘rationalization,'” Yoshio suggested, handing Mika a plate. “It sounds nicer. We remove unnecessary barriers in the flow of the global Net. Barriers that happen to be governments.”

“But what kind of world would that give us?”

“It would depend on who made the new rules,” Yoshio said. “If you join the winning side, you get to vote. If not, well …” He shrugged.

“Yeah? What if your side loses?”

“Then the nations get to fight over us, to try us for treason,” Mika said. “The courts could sort it out. In fifty years maybe.”

“I think I'd burn my Japanese passport and become a Mexican citizen,” Yoshio mused. “Maybe all of us could become Mexican citizens. Mexico wouldn't complain. Or we could try Grenada! We could try a new country every year.”

“Don't betray your
own
government,” Mika suggested. “Just betray
everyone else
's government. No one ever called
that
treason.”

“Rizome elections are coming up soon,” Yoshio said. “You say you're economic democrats. If you believe in the Net—if you believe your own morality—you cannot escape this issue. Why not put it to a vote?”

Even at Atlanta's airport, Laura felt that hemmed-in, antsy feeling the city always gave her. The megalopolis, that edgy tempo … So many Americans, with their clean, expensive clothes and bulging luggage. Milling under the giant, slanting openwork of multimillionecu geodesics, sleek designer geometries of light and space. Rose-pink abstract mobiles, reacting to the crowd flow, dipped and whirled slowly overhead. Like exploded cybernetic flocks of flamingos …

“Wow,” David said, nudging her with the bay's tote. “Who's the fox with Emily?”

Two women approaching. One, short and round-faced, in long skirt and frilled blouse: Emily Donato. Laura felt a surge of pleasure and relief. Emily was here, Rizome's cavalry. Laura waved.

And Emily's companion: a tall black woman with a lovely machine-curled mane of auburn hair, carrying herself like a runway model. Lean and elegant, with coffee-colored skin and cheekbones to die for. “Whoa,” Laura said. “That's—what's her name—Arbright something.”

“Dianne Arbright on cable news,” David said, gawking. “A media talking head. Look, she's got legs just like a real human being!”

David gave Emily a hard, crunching hug, lifting her off the floor. Emily laughed at him and kissed his cheeks. “Hi,” Laura said to the TV journalist. She shook Arbright's cool, muscular hand. “I suppose this means we're famous.”

“Yeah, this crowd's full of journos,” Arbright told her. She flicked the lapel of her saffron silk business vest. “I'm wired for sound, by the way.”

“So are we, I think,” Laura said. “I got a telly-rig in my carry-on.”

“I'll pool my data with the other correspondents,” Arbright said. There was the faintest beading of sweat on her upper lip, below the sleek mocha perfection of her video makeup. “Not that we can air it, but … we network behind the scenes.” She glanced at Emily. “Y'all know how it is.”

Laura watched Arbright with an eerie sense of dislocation. Meeting Dianne Arbright in person was a bit like seeing the “real” Mona Lisa—some essential reality leached out by too many reproductions. “Is it Vienna?” she said.

Arbright allowed herself a grimace. “We ran some of Rizome's disaster footage two days ago. We know how bad it is there—the casualty counts, the forms of attack. But since then, Grenada's sealed its borders. And Vienna censors everything we air.”

“But this is too big to contain,” Emily said. “And everybody knows it. This goes way past the limits—somebody just trashed an entire country, for Christ's sake.”

“It's the biggest terrie operation since Santa Vicenza,” Arbright said.

“What happened there?” David asked innocently.

Arbright gave David the blank look one gives to the terminally out-of-it. “Maybe you can tell me exactly what happened at your Lodge in Galveston,” Arbright said at last.

“Oh,” David said. “I, uh, guess I see what you mean.”

“‘Damage limitation,'” Laura said. “That's what happened in Galveston.”

“And in a lot of other places—for years,” Arbright said. “So you two are nonpeople, deep-background, off the record. Kinda tough on the good old First Amendment …” Arbright flashed some high sign at a brown-suited stranger in the crowd, who grinned and nodded at her. “But Vienna can't stop us from discovering the truth—just from publicizing it.”

They filtered toward one of the exists. Arbright tapped her platinum watchphone. “I got a limo waiting.…”

“The Vienna heat's here!” David said.

Arbright glanced up placidly. “Nah. It's just some guy wearin' viddies.”

“How can you tell?” David said.

“He's got the wrong vibe for Vienna,” Arbright told him patiently. “Viddies don't mean much—I wear 'em myself sometimes.”

“We've been wearing viddies for days,” Laura said.

Arbright perked up. “You mean you've got it all? Your whole tour of Grenada? On tape?”

“Every minute,” David told her. “Damn near.”

“It's worth plenty,” Arbright said.

“Oughta be,” David grumbled. “It was a living hell.”

“Emily,” Arbright said, “who owns the rights, and what are you asking?”

“Rizome doesn't peddle news for money,” Emily said virtuously. “That's
gesellschaft
stuff.… Besides, there's the little matter of explaining what Rizome personnel were doing in a pirate data haven.”

“Mmm,” Arbright said. “Yeah, that's a tough angle.”

Glass double doors hissed open and shut for them, and Arbright's stretch limo flung its door over the curb, amid a line of taxis. The limo had mirrored windows and a set of microwave beamers in its roof that looked like water-cooled ray guns. They jumped in, following Arbright's lead. The limo slid away.

“Now we're cool,” Arbright announced. She popped down a sliding cabinet door and checked her makeup in a stage mirror. “My people have worked this limo over—it's surveillance-tight.”

They headed down a curving access ramp. It was an ugly day, gray September overcast cutting across the Atlanta skyline. A mountain range of skyscrapers: postmodern, neo-Gothic, Organic Baroque, even a few boxy premillennium relics, dwarfed by their weird progeny. “Three cars are following us,” Emily said.

“Jealous of my sources.” Arbright smiled, her eyes lighting up to television wattage. David turned to look.

“They're tracking all of us,” Emily said. “The whole Rizome committee. Got our apartments staked out—and I think Vienna's tapping our lines.” She rubbed her eyelids. “Dianne—you got a wet bar in this thing?”

Arbright picked up an eyebrow pencil. “Just tell the machine.”

“Car, make me a Dirty Kimono,” Emily commanded. She rubbed her neck, mashing curls. “Not much sleep lately—I'm a little wired.”

“They're really after us? Vienna?” David said.

“They're after everybody. Like an anthill jabbed with a stick.” The car gave Emily a cloudy mix that reeked of sake. “This meeting we held with Kymera and Farben—‘summit,' they called it.…” She blinked and sipped her drink. “Laura, I missed you.”

“Getting' crazy,” Laura said. An old tag line from their college days together. How tired Emily looked—crow's feet in the fine-boned hollow of her temples, more gray threading in her hair—tired hell, why mince words, Laura thought, they were both in their thirties now. Not college kids. Old. An impulse struck her, and she rubbed Emily's shoulders. Emily almost dropped her glass in gratification. “Yeah,” she said.

“Who are you with?” David asked Arbright.

“You mean my company?”

“I mean your basic loyalties.”

“Oh,” Arbright said. “I'm a professional. An American journalist.”

David looked tentative. “‘American?'”

“I don't believe in Vienna,” Arbright declared. “Spooks and censors telling Americans what we can and can't say. Cover-ups to deny the terries publicity—that was always a half-assed idea.” She tossed her head. “Now the whole system, the whole political structure … is gonna blow to hell!” She slapped the seat with the flat of her hand. “I've been waiting for this for
years
! Man, I'm as happy about it as a cutworm in corn!” She looked surprised at herself. “As my granddad used to say …”

“Sounds kind of anarchical.…” David rocked the tote on his knees.

Little Loretta didn't like the sound of political stridency. Her face was clouding up.

“Americans used to live like that all the time! We called it ‘freedom.'”

David looked dubious. “I meant, realistically speaking … the global information structure …” He let Loretta grip his fingers and tried to shush her.

“I'm saying we need to pull the masks off and tackle our problems head-on,” Arbright said. “Okay, Singapore's a pariah state, they just trashed their rivals—fine. Let 'em pay the price for aggression.”

“Singapore?” David said. “You think Singapore is the F.A.C.T.?”

Arbright leaned back in her seat and looked at all three of them. “Well. I see the Rizome contingent has another opinion.” A dangerous lightness in her voice.

Laura had heard that tone before. During interviews, just before Arbright was about to nail some poor bastard.

The baby wailed aloud.

“Don't all speak up at once,” Arbright said.

“How do you know it's Singapore?” Laura said.

“How? Okay. I'll tell you.” Arbright shoved her makeup cabinet shut with the toe of her Italian boot. “I know it because the pirate databanks in Singapore are full of it. Y'know, we journos—we need a place to trade information, where Vienna can't get on our case. That's why every damned one of us worth his salt is a data pirate.”

“Oh …”

“And they're laughing about it in Singapore. Bragging. It's all over the boards.” She looked at them. “All right. I've told you. Now you tell me.”

Emily spoke up. “The F.A.C.T. is the secret police of the Republic of Mali.”

“Not that again,” Arbright said, crestfallen. “Look, you hear ugly rumors about Mali all the time. It's nothing new. Mali's a starvation regime, full of mercenaries, and their reputation stinks. But they wouldn't dare try a stunt as huge and flagrant as FACT's attack on Grenada. Mali, defying Vienna with an international terror atrocity? It doesn't make sense.”