Islands in the Net (54 page)

But we were the enemies of grass
,

That is why we suffer
.

What our cows did not eat, the sheep ate
.

What the sheep refused, the goats consumed
.

What the goats left behind, the camels devoured
.

Now we must be the friends of grass
,

We must apologize to it and treat it kindly
.

Its enemies are our enemies
.

We must kill the cow and the sheep
,

We must butcher the goat and behead the camel
.

For a thousand years we loved our herds
,

For a thousand years we must praise the grass
.

We will eat the tisma food to live
,

We will buy Iron Camels from GoMotion Unlimited in Santa Clara California
.

Gresham folded his arms. The singer continued. “There's a lot more,” Gresham said, “but that's the gist of it.”

The question was obvious. “Did you write it for them?”

“No,” he said proudly. “It's an old song.” He paused. “Retrofitted.”

“Yeah.”

“A few of this crowd may join us. A few of the few may stay. It's a hard life in the desert.” He looked at her. “I'm gone in the morning.”

“Tomorrow? That soon?”

“It has to be that way.”

The cruelty of it hurt her badly. Not his cruelty but the pure cruelty of necessity. She knew immediately that she would never see him again. She felt lacerated, relieved, panicky.

“Well, you did it, didn't you?” she said hoarsely. “You rescued me and you saved my friend's life.” She tried to embrace him.

He backed off. “No, not out here—not in front of them.” He took her elbow. “Let's go inside.”

He led her back into the dome. The guards were still there, patrolling. Against thieves, she thought. They were afraid of thieves and vandals from the camp. Beggars. It seemed so pathetic that she began weeping.

Gresham flicked on the screen of his computer. Amber light flooded the tent. He returned to the door of the dome, spoke to the guards. One of them said something to him in a sharp, high-pitched voice and began laughing. Gresham swung the door shut, sealed it with a clamp.

He saw her tears. “What's all this?”

“You, me. The world. Everything.” She wiped her cheek on her sleeve. “Those camp people have nothing. Even though you're trying to help them, they'd steal all this
stuff of
yours, if they could.”

“Ah,” Gresham said, lightly. “That's what we high-falutin' cultural meddlers refer to as ‘the vital level of corruption.'”

“You don't have to talk that way to me. Now that I can see what you're trying to do.”

“Oh, Lord,” Gresham said unhappily. He stalked across the dome in the mellow light of the monitor and gathered an armload of burlap bags. He lugged them next to his screen and terminal and spread them for pillows. “Come on, sit here with me.”

She joined him. The pillows had a pleasant, resinous smell. They were full of grass seed. She saw that some were already half empty. They'd been sowing the grass in the gullies as they ran from pursuit.

“Don't get to thinking I'm too much like you,” he said. “Honest and sweet and wishing everybody the best.… I grant you good intentions, but intentions don't count for much. Corruption—that's what counts.”

He meant it. They were sitting together inches apart, but something was eating at him so badly that he wouldn't look at her. “What you just said—it doesn't make any sense to me.”

“I was in Miami once,” he said. “A long time ago. The sky was pink! I stopped this rudie on the boardwalk, I said: looks like you got some bad particulate problems here. He told me the sky was full of Africa. And it was true! It was the harmattan, the sandstorms. Top-soil from the Sahara, blown right across the Atlantic. And I said to myself: there, that place, that's your home.”

He looked at her, into her eyes. “You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have borne from time immemorial—they all
lived
. It wasn't that the world didn't care. They struggled heroically, for generations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity.”

“That's too complicated for me, Gresham. It's perverse!”

“You're grateful to me, because you think I saved you. The hell. We did our best to kill everyone in that convoy. We raked that truck with machine-gun fire, three times. I don't know how the hell you lived.”

“‘Fortunes of war …'”

“I love war, Laura. I enjoy it, like the F.A.C.T. Them, they enjoy murdering rag-heads with robots. Me, I'm more visceral. Somewhere inside me, I wanted Armageddon, and this is as close as it ever got. Where the Earth is blasted and all the sickness comes to a head.”

He leaned closer. “But that's not all of it. I'm not innocent enough to let chaos alone. I stink of the Net, Laura. Of power and planning and data, and the Western method, and the pure inability to let anything alone. Ever. Even if it destroys my own freedom. The Net lost Africa once, blew it so badly that it went bad and wild, but the Net will get it back, someday. Green and pleasant and controlled, and just like everywhere else.”

“So I win, and you lose—is that what you're telling me? That we're enemies? Maybe we are enemies, in some abstract way that's all in your head. But as people, we're friends, aren't we? And I'd never hurt you if I could help it.”

“You can't help it. You were hurting me even before I knew you existed.” He leaned back. “Maybe my abstractions aren't your abstractions, so I'll give you some of your own. How do you think I
financed
all this? Grenada. They were my biggest backers. Winston Stubbs … now there was a man with vision. We didn't always see eye to eye, but we were allies. It hurt a lot to lose him.”

She was shocked. “I remember.… They said he gave money to terrorist groups.”

“I haven't been picky. I can't afford to be—this project of mine, it's all Net stuff, money, and money's corruption is in the very heart of it. The Tuaregs have nothing to sell, they're Saharan nomads, destitute. They don't have anything the Net wants—so I beg and scrape. A few rich Arabs, nostalgic for the desert while they tool around in their limousines.… Arms dealers, not many of those left.… I even took money from FACT, back in the old days, before the Countess went batshit.”

“Katje told me that! That it's a woman who runs FACT. The Countess! Is it true?”

He was surprised, sidetracked. “She doesn't ‘run it,' exactly, and she's not really a countess, that's just her nom de guerre.… But, yeah, I knew her, in the old days. I knew her very well, when we were younger. As well as I know you.”

“You were
lovers
?”

He smiled. “Are we
lovers
, Laura?”

The silence stretched, a desert silence broken by the distant whooping of the Tuaregs. She looked into his eyes.

“I talk too much,” he said sadly. “A theorist.”

She stood and pulled the tunic over her head, threw it to her feet. She sat beside him, naked, in the light of the screen.

He was silent. Clumsily, she pulled at his shirt, ran her hand over his chest. He opened his robe and put his weight on her.

He fumbled at her gently. For the first time, something vital, deep within her, realized that she was alive again. As if her soul had gone to sleep like a handcuffed arm, and now blood was returning. A torrent of sensation.

A moment passed with the muted crinkling of contraceptive plastic. Then he was on her, inside her. She wrapped her legs around him, her skin aflame. Flesh and muscle moving in darkness, the smell of sex. She closed her eyes, overwhelmed.

He stopped for a moment. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her, his face alight. Then he reached out with one arm and tapped the keyboard.

The machine scanned channels. Light flashed over them as it blasted one-second gouts of satellite video into the tent. Unable to stop herself, she turned her head to look.

Cityscape / cityscape / trees / a woman / brand names / Arabic script / image / image / image /

They were moving in time. They were moving in rhythm to the set, eyes lifted up, fixed on the screen.

Pleasure shot through her like channeled lightning. She cried out.

He gripped her hard and closed his eyes. He was going to finish soon. She did what she could to help him.

And it was over. He slid aside, touched the screen. The image froze on a weather station, ranks of silent numbers, cool computer-graphic blues of lows and highs.

“Thank you,” he said. “You were good to me.”

She was shaking in reaction. She found her robe and put it on, body-mind whirling in turmoil. As reality came seeping back, she felt a sudden giddy wash of joy, of pure release.

It was over, there was nothing to fear. They were people together, a man and woman. She felt a sudden rush of affection for him. She reached out. Surprised, he patted her hand. Then he rose and moved into the television dimness.

She heard him fumbling, opening a bag. He was back in a moment. Bright gleam of tin. “Abalone.”

She sat up. Her stomach rumbled loudly. They laughed, comfortable in their embarrassment, the erotic squalor of intimacy. He pried open the can and they ate. “God, it's so good,” she told him.

“I never eat anything grown in topsoil. Plants are full of deadly natural insecticides. People are nuts to eat that stuff.”

“My husband used to say that all the time.”

He looked up, slowly. “I'm gone tomorrow,” he repeated. “Don't worry about anything.”

“It's fine, I'll be all right.” Meaningless words, but the concern was there—it was as if they had kissed. Night had fallen, it had grown cold. She shivered.

“I'll take you back to camp.”

“I'll stay, if you want.”

He stood up, helped to her feet. “No. It's warmer there.”

Katje lay in a camp bed, white sheets, the floral smell of an air spray over the reek of disinfectant. There was not much machinery by modern standards, but it was a clinic and they had pulled her through.

“Where did you find such clothes?” she whispered.

Laura touched her blouse self-consciously. It was a red off-the-shoulder number, with a ruffled skirt. “One of the nurses—Sara … I can't pronounce her last name.”

Katje seemed to think it was funny. It was the first time Laura had ever seen her smile. “Yes … there's such a girl in every camp.… You must be popular.”

“They're good people, they've treated me very well.”

“You didn't tell them … about the Bomb.”

“No—I thought I'd leave that to you. I didn't think they'd believe me.”

Katje let the lie float over her, not taken in, but letting it pass. Noblesse oblige, or maybe the anesthetic. “I told them … now I don't worry … let them worry.”

“Good idea, save your strength.”

“I won't do this anymore.… I'm going home. To be happy.” She closed her eyes.

The door opened. The director, Mbaqane, barged through, followed by Barnaard the political man, and the paratroop captain.

And then the Vienna personnel. There were three of them. Two men in safari suits and speckled glasses, and a stylish, middle-aged Russian woman in a jacket, sleek khaki pants, and patent-leather boots.

They stopped by the bed. “So these are our heroes,” the woman said brightly.

“Indeed, yes,” said Mbaqane.

“My name is Tamara Frolova—this is Mr. Easton, and Mr. Neguib from our Cairo office.”

“How do you do,” Laura said reflexively. She almost rose to shake hands, then stopped herself. “This is Dr. Selous.… She's very tired, I'm afraid.”

“And small wonder, yes? After such narrow escapes.”

“Ms. Frolova has very good news for us,” Mbaqane said. “A ceasefire is declared. The camp is out of danger! It seems the Malian regime is prepared to sue for peace!”

“Wow,” Laura said. “Are they handing over the bombs?”

Unhappy silence.

“A natural question,” said Frolova. “But there have been some errors. Honest mistakes.” She shook her head. “There are no bombs, Mrs. Webster.”

Laura jumped to her feet. “I expected that!”

“Please sit down, Mrs. Webster.”

“Ms. Frolova—Tamara—let me speak to you as a person. I don't know what your bosses ordered you to say, but it's over now. You can't walk away from it anymore.”

Frolova's face froze. “I know you have suffered an ordeal, Mrs. Webster. Laura. But one should not act irresponsibly. You must think first. Reckless allegations of such a kind—they are a clear public danger to the international order.”

“They were taking me—both of us—to an
atomic test site
! For nuclear blackmail! To Azania, this time—God knows they already had you intimidated.”

“The area you saw was not a test site.”

“Stop being
stupid
! It doesn't even
need
Gresham's tape. You may have fast-talked these poor medicos, but the Azanian spooks aren't going to settle for words. They'll want to fly over the desert and look for the crater.”

“I'm sure that could be arranged!” Frolova said. “After the current hostilities settle.”

Laura laughed. “I knew you'd say that, too. That's an arrangement you'll never make, if you can help it. But the cover-up is still finished. You forget—we've
been there
. The air was full of dust. They can test our clothes, and they'll find radioactivity. Maybe not much, but enough for proof.” She turned to Mbaqane. “Don't let them anywhere near those clothes. Because they'll grab the evidence, after they've grabbed us.”