Islands in the Net (34 page)

“I'm the devil in a cathedral! Stained glass everywhere, but me with lightning under every fingertip! I'm Steppin' Razor, Voice of Destruction, they're gonna bust every black man in this town lookin' for us and they fockin' multiracial social justice, I mean
chaos
!” He was shrieking at her. “Not a stone on a stone! Not a board standing, not a mirror glass that don't cut to the bone!” He danced across the room, flailing his arms, kicking trash underfoot. “Jah fire! Thunder! I can do it, girl! It's
easy
! So easy …”

“No! Nobody has to die!”

“It's great! And grand! A great adventure! It's glorious! To have the mighty power in you, and let it run, that's a warrior's life! That's what I have, right now, right here, worth everything, anything!”

“No, it's not!” she screamed at him. “It's craziness! Nothing's easy, you've got to think it through—”

He vanished before her eyes. It was quick, and simple. He gave a sort of sideways jump and wriggle first, as if he'd greased himself to slide through a hole in reality. Gone.

She rose from her chair, legs still a little weak, a pain behind her knees. She looked around herself carefully. Silence, the sound of dust settling, the damp warm smell of garbage. She was alone.

“Sticky?” she said. The words fell on emptiness. “Come back, talk to me.”

A rush of human presence. Behind her, at her back. She turned, and there he stood. “You a silly girl,” he said, “somebody's
mother
.” He snapped his fingers under her nose.

She tried to shove him away. He seized her neck with whiplash speed. “Go on,” he crooned, “just breathe.”

8

A monsoon breeze whipped at her hair. Laura looked over the city from the roof of the Rizome godown. The Net was a broken spider-web. No phones at all. Television shut down, except for a single, emergency government channel. Laura felt the dead electric silence in her bones.

The dozen Rizome associates were all on the roof, morosely spooning up breakfasts of seaweed and kashi. Laura rubbed her bare, phoneless wrist, nervously. Below her, three stories down by the loading docks, a gang of Anti-Labourites practiced their morning Tai Chi Chuan. Soft, languorous, hypnotic movements. No one led them, but they moved in unison.

They had barricaded the streets, their bamboo rickshaws laden with stolen sacks of cement and rubber and coffee beans. They were defying the curfew, the government's sudden and draconic declaration of martial law, which lay over Singapore like a blanket of lead. The streets were the army's now. And the skies, too.… Tall monsoon clouds over the morning South China Sea, a glamorous tropic gleam like puffed gray silk. Against the clouds, the dragonfly cutouts of police helicopters.

At first, the Anti-Labourites had claimed, as before, that they were “observing for civil rights.” But as more and more of them had gathered during the night of the fourteenth, the pretense had faded. They had broken into warehouses and offices, smashing windows, barricading doors. Now the rebels were swarming through the Rizome godown, appropriating anything they felt was useful.…

There were hundreds of them, up and down the waterfront, viper-eyed young radicals in blood-red headbands and wrinkled paper clothes, wearing disposable surgical masks to hide their identities from police video. Grouping on street corners, exchanging elaborate ritual handshakes. Some of them muttering into toy walkie-talkies.

They had gathered here deliberately. Some kind of contingency plan. The docklands of East Lagoon were their stronghold, their natural turf.

The docks had been depressed for years, half abandoned from the global embargoes inflicted on Singapore. The powerful Longshoreman's Union had protested to the P.I.P. rulership with increasing bitterness. Until the troublesome union had been simply and efficiently disemployed, as a deliberate act, by a government investment in industrial robots.

But with the embargoes, even the robots were idle much of the time. Which was why Rizome had been able to buy into the shipping business cheaply. It was hard for Singapore to turn down such a sucker bet: even knowing that Rizome's intentions were political, an industrial beachhead.

The P.I.P.'s attack on the union, like most of their actions, was smart and farsighted and ruthless. But none of it had worked out quite the way the Government had planned. The union hadn't broken, but bent, twisted, mutated, and spread. Suddenly they had stopped demanding work at all, and started demanding permanent leisure.

Laura could see them down there now, in the streets. A few were women, a few older men, but mostly classic young troublemakers. She'd read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world's havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five. They were branding the walls and streets with neat stenciled slogans.
“PLAY FOR KEEPS!
”… “
WORKERS OF THE WORLD, RELAX!”

Razak's Rejects, their bellies full of cheap bacterial chow. For years they'd lived for next to nothing, dossing down in abandoned warehouses, drinking from public fountains. Politics filled their days, an elaborate ideology, as convoluted as a religion.

Like most Singaporeans, they were sports nuts. Day after day they gathered in their polite, penniless hordes, keeping fit with healthful exercise. Except in their case it was unarmed combat—a very cheap sport, requiring no equipment but the human body.…

You could tell them in the streets by the way they walked. Heads held high, eyes glazed with that calm karate look that came from the knowledge that they could break human bones with their hands. They were worthless and proud, languidly accepting any handout the system offered, but showing nothing even close to gratitude. Legally and constitutionally speaking, it was hard to say why they shouldn't be allowed to do nothing.… Except, of course, that it struck at the very heart of the industrial ethic.

Laura left the parapet. Mr. Suvendra had jury-rigged a coat-hanger antenna for his battery-powered TV, and they were struggling to catch a broadcast from Johore. The broadcast flickered on suddenly, and everyone crowded around the television. Laura shouldered her way in between Ali and Suvendra's young niece, Derveet.

Emergency news. The anchorman was a Malay-speaking Maphilindonesian. The image was scratchy. It was hard to tell whether it was a simple TV screwup or deliberate jamming by Singapore.

“Invasion talk,” Suvendra translated gloomily. “Vienna are not liking this state of emergency: they call it coup d'état, la!”

A young newswoman in a chiffon Muslim
chador
gestured at a map of the Malay peninsula. Nasty-looking storm fronts showed the potential striking range of Singaporean planes and ships. A weather girl for warfare, Laura thought.

“Definitely, Vienna could not invasion against all that, la.…”

“Singapore Air Force are flying up Nauru, to protect the launch sites!”

“I hope their giant lasers are not hitting their own fellow in orbit!”

“Those poor little Pacific Island fellows, they must bitterly regretting the day they started on Singapore client-state!”

Despite its awful news, the television was cheering everyone up. The sense of contact with the Net sent a quick, racing sense of community over them. Half circled, shoulder to shoulder before the TV, they were almost like a Rizome council session. Suvendra felt it, too—she looked up with her first smile in hours.

Laura was discreetly silent. The crew were still chagrined at her for disappearing earlier. She had run off to get in touch with David and had come back unconscious in a cab. She had told them about meeting Sticky. Their first thought was to inform the Government—but the Government had all that news already. The spring guns, the pellets, the mines—the acting prime minister, Jeyaratnam, had announced all that on television. Warned the populace—and shut them up in their own homes.

Suvendra clapped her hands. “Council session?”

A young associate manned the television, off on the corner of the roof. The rest linked hands and briefly sang a Rizome song, in Malay. Amid the city's menacing silence, their raised voices felt good. It almost made Laura forget that Rizome Singapore were now refugees skulking on the roof of their own property.…

“For me,” Suvendra told them seriously, “I think we have done all we can. The Government is martial law now, isn't it? Violence is coming, isn't it? Do any of us want to fight Government? Hands?”

No one voted for violence. They'd already voted with their feet—by running upstairs to avoid the rebels.

Ali spoke up. “Could we escape the city?”

“Out to sea?” suggested Derveet hopefully.

They looked over the waterfront: the unmanned cargo ships, the giant idle cranes, the loading robots shut down by Anti-Labourite longshoremen who had seized the control systems. Out to sea were the skidding white plumes of navy hydrofoils on patrol.

“This isn't Grenada. They're not letting anyone go,” Mr. Suvendra said with finality. “They'd shoot at us.”

“I agree,” said Suvendra. “But we could demand arrest, la. By the Government.”

The others looked gloomy.

“Here we are radicals,” Suvendra told them. “We are economic democrats in authoritarian regime. It is Singapore reform we are demanding, but chance is spoilt, now. So the proper place for us in Singapore is jail.”

Long, meditative silence. Monsoon thunder rolled in from offshore.

“I like the idea,” Laura said meekly.

Ali tugged at his lower lip. “Safe from voodoo terrorists, in jail.”

“Also less chance that the fascist Army might accidentally shoot us on purpose, la.”

“We must decide for us. We can't ask Atlanta,” Suvendra pointed out.

They looked unhappy. Laura had a brainstorm. “Atlanta—it has a famous jail. Martin Luther King stayed there.”

They broke into eager discussion.

“But we shan't do any good from jail, la.”

“Yes, we can. Embarrass the government! Martial law can't last.”

“We do no good here anyway, if Parliament is spoilt.”

Distant echoed shouting rose from the streets. “I'll go look,” Laura told them, standing up.

She strode across the hot, flat rooftop to the parapet again. The noise grew louder: it was a police bullhorn. For a moment she glimpsed it, two blocks away: a red-and-white police car moving cautiously across a deserted intersection. It stopped before the ragged burlap heap of a street barricade.

Ali joined her. “We voted,” he told her. “It's jail.”

“Okay. Good.”

Ali studied the police car, listening to it. “It's Mr. bin Awang,” he said. “Malay M.P. from Bras Basah.”

“Oh, yeah,” Laura said. “I remember him from the hearings.”

“Surrender talk. Go peacefully, back to families, he says.”

Rebels emerged from the shadows. They swaggered toward the car, lazily, fearlessly. Laura could see them shouting at the bulletproof glass, gesturing to the cop behind the wheel—turn around, go back.
Verboten
. Liberated territory …

The roof-mounted bullhorn bleated arguments.

One of the kids began spray-painting a slogan onto the hood. The prowl car emitted an angry siren wail and began backing up.

Suddenly the kids pulled weapons. Short, heavy swords, hidden in their shirts and pants. They began hacking furiously at the prowl car's tires and door hinges. Unbelievably, the car gave way, with tortured screeches of metal audible for blocks around.…

Laura and Ali shouted in astonishment. The rebels were using those deadly ceramic machetes, the same as she'd seen in Grenada. The long high-tech knives that had chopped a desk in half.

The other Rizomians ran up. The rebels hacked the hood off in seconds and efficiently butchered the engine. They wrenched the door off with ear-torturing screeches.

They were pulling the car apart.

They fished out the astonished cops, rabbit-punching them into submission. They got the M.P., too.

But then, suddenly, there was a chopper overhead.

Tear-gas canisters fell, shrouding the scene in up-rushing columns of mist. The rebels scattered. A burly longshoreman, wearing a diving mask, lifted a stolen police blunderbuss and fired tangle-rounds upward. They splattered harmlessly on the chopper's undercarriage in wads of writhing plastic, but it backed off anyway.

More siren howls and three more backup prowl cars rushed into the intersection. They skidded to a halt before the shattered car. Kids were still running from the wreckage, doubled over, clutching stolen tangle-ammo and stenciled canisters. Some wore rubber swim goggles, giving them a weirdly squinty, professorial look. Their surgical masks seemed to help against the tear gas.

Doors flung open and the cops deployed, wearing full riot gear: white helmets, perspex face shields, tangle-guns, and lathi sticks. Kids scuttled for cover into the surrounding buildings. The cops conferred briefly, pointing at a doorway, ready to charge.

There was a sudden feeble
whump
from the wreckage of the prowl car. The car seats belched flame.

In a few moments, a Molotov column of burning upholstery was rising over the waterfront.

Ali yelled in Malay and pointed. Half a dozen rebels had appeared a block away from the fight, hauling an unconscious cop through a rathole in the side of a warehouse. They had chopped their way through the concrete blocks with their machetes.

“They have
parangs
!” Ali said with a kind of horrified glee. “Like magic kung-fu swords, la!”

The cops looked unhappy about charging the doorways. No wonder. Laura could imagine it: dashing bravely forward with tangle-gun drawn … only to feel a sudden pain and fall down and find that some rat-faced little anarchist behind the door had just razored your leg off at the knee.… Oh, Jesus, those fucking machetes! They were like goddamned
lasers
.… What kind of stupid short-term-thinking bastard had invented those?