And on the closer edge of the mighty deck she could see—what? Mango trees, lines of flapping laundry, people clustered at the long, long railing.… Hundreds of them. Far more than anybody could need for a crew. She spoke to Carlotta. “They live there, don’t they.”
Carlotta nodded. “A lot goes on in these ships.”
“You mean there’s more than one?”
Carlotta shrugged. “Maybe.” She tapped her own eyelid, indicating Laura’s videoglasses. “Let’s just say Grenada makes a pretty good flag of convenience.”
Laura stared at the supertanker, scanning its length carefully for the sake of Atlanta’s tapes. “Even if the Bank bought it for junk—that’s a lot of steel. Must have cost millions.”
Carlotta snickered. “You’re not too hip about black markets, huh? The problem’s always cash. What to do with it, I mean. Grenada’s rich, Laura. And gettin’ richer all the time.”
“But why buy ships?”
“Now you’re getting into ideology,” Carlotta told her. “Have to ask ol’ Andrei about that.”
Now Laura could see how old the monster was. Its sides were blotted with great caking masses of rust, sealed shut under layers of modern high-tech shellac. The shellac clung, but badly; in places it had the wrinkled look of failing plastic wrap. The ship’s endless sheet-iron hull had flexed from heat and cold and loading stress, and even the enormous strength of modern bonded plastics couldn’t hold. Laura saw stretch marks, and broken-edged blisters of “boat pox,” and patches of cracked alligatoring where the plastic had popped loose in plates, like dried mud. All this covered with patches of new glue and big slathery drips of badly cured gunk. A hundred shades of black and gray and rust. Here and there, work gangs had spray-bombed the hull of the supertanker with intricate colored graffiti. “TANKERSKANKERS,” “MONGOOSE CREW—WE OPTIMAL,” “CHARLIE NOGUES BATALLION.”
They tied up at a floating sea-level dock. The dock was like a flattened squid of bright yellow rubber, with radiating walkways and a floating bladder-head in the center. A bird-cage elevator slid down the dock’s moored cable from a deck-level gantry seventy feet up. They followed Andrei into the cage and it rose, jerkily. David, who enjoyed heights, watched avidly through the bars as the sea shrank below them. Below his dark glasses, he grinned like a ten-year-old. He was really enjoying this, Laura realized as she clutched the baby’s tote, white-knuckled. It was all right up his alley.
The gantry swung them over the deck. Laura saw the gantry’s operator as they passed—she was an old black woman in dreadlocks, shuffling her knobbed gearshifts and rhythmically chewing gum. Below them, the monstrous deck stretched like an airport runway, broken with odd-looking functional clusters: dogged hatches, ridged metal vents, fireplugs, foam tanks, foil-wrapped hydraulic lines bent in reverse U’s over the bicycle paths. Long tents, too, and patches of garden: trees in tubs, stretched greenhouse sheets of plastic over rows of citrus. And neatly stacked mountains of stuffed burlap bags.
They descended over a taped X on the deck and settled with a bump. “Everybody off,” Andrei said. They stepped out and the elevator rose at once. Laura sniffed the air. A familiar scent under the rust and brine and plastic. A wet, fermenting smell, like tofu.
“Scop!” David said, delighted. “Single-cell protein!”
“Yes,” Andrei said. “The Charles Nogues is a food ship.”
“Who’s this ‘Nogues’?” David asked him.
“He was a native hero,” Andrei said, his face solemn.
Carlotta nodded at David. “Charles Nogues threw himself off a cliff.”
“What?” David said. “He was one of those Carib Indians?”
“No, he was a Free Coloured. They came later, they were anti-slavery. But the Redcoat army showed up, and they died fighting.” Carlotta paused. “It’s an awful fuckin’ mess, Grenada history. I learned all this from Sticky.”
“The crew of this ship are the vanguard of the New Millennium Movement,” Andrei declared. The four of them followed his lead, strolling toward the distant, looming high-rise of the ship’s superstructure. It was hard not to see it as some peculiar office complex, because the ship itself felt so city-solid underfoot. Traffic passed them on the bicycle paths, men pedaling loaded cargo-rickshaws. “Trusted party cadres,” said blond, Polish Andrei. “Our nomenklatura.”
Laura fell a step behind, hefting the baby in her tote, while David and Andrei walked forward, shoulder to shoulder. “It’s starting to make a certain conceptual sense,” David told him. “This time, if you get chased off your own island like Nogues and the Caribs, you’ll have a nice place to jump to. Right?” He waved at the ship around them.
Andrei nodded soberly. “Grenada remembers her many invasions. Her people are very brave, and visionaries too, but she’s a small country. But the ideas here today are big, David. Bigger than boundaries.”
David looked Andrei up and down, taking his measure. “What the hell is a guy from Gdansk doing here, anyway?”
“Life is dull in the Socialist Bloc,” Andrei told him airily. “All consumer socialism, no spiritual values. I wanted to be with the action. And the action is South, these days. The North, our developed world—it is boring. Predictable. This is the edge that cuts.”
“So you’re not one of those ‘mad-doctor’ types, huh?”
Andrei was contemptuous. “Such people are useful, only. We buy them, but they have no true role in the New Millennium Movement. They don’t understand People’s Tech.” Laura could hear the capital letters in his emphasis. She didn’t like the way this was going at all.
She spoke up. “Sounds very nice. How do you square that with dope factories and data piracy?”
“All information should be free,” Andrei told her, slowing his walk. “As for drugs—” He reached into a side pocket in his jeans. He produced a flat roll of shiny paper and handed it to her.
Laura looked it over. Little peel-off rectangles of sticky-backed paper. It looked like a blank roll of address labels. “So?”
“You paste them on,” Andrei said patiently. “The glue has an agent, which carries the drug through the skin. The drug came from a wetware lab, it is synthetic THC, the active part of marijuana. Your little roll of paper is the same, you see, as many kilograms of hashish. It is worth about twenty ecu. Very little.” He paused. “Not so thrilling, so romantic, eh? Not so much to get excited about.”
“Christ,” Laura said. She tried to hand it back.
“Please keep it, it means very little.”
Carlotta spoke up. “She can’t hold this, Andrei. Come on, they’re online and the bosses are lookin’.” She stuffed the roll of paper into her purse, grinning at Laura. “You know, Laura, if you’d point those glasses over there to starboard, I can slap a little of this crystal on the back of your neck, and nobody in Atlanta will ever know. You can rush like Niagara on this stuff. Crystal THC, girl! The Goddess was cruisin’ when She invented that one.”
“Those are mind-altering drugs,” Laura protested. She sounded stuffy and virtuous, even to herself. Andrei smiled indulgently, and Carlotta laughed aloud. “They’re dangerous,” Laura said.
“Maybe you think it will jump off the paper and bite you,” Andrei said. He waved politely at a passing Rastaman.
“You know what I mean,” Laura said.
“Oh, yes”—Andrei yawned—“you never use drugs yourself, but what about the effect on people who are stupider and weaker than you, eh? You are patronizing other people. Invading their freedoms.”
They walked past a huge electric anchor winch, and a giant pump assembly, with two-story painted tanks in a jungle of pipes. Rastas with hard hats and clipboards paced the catwalks over the pipes.
“You’re not being fair,” David said. “Drugs can trap people.”
“Maybe,” Andrei said. “If they have nothing better in their lives. But look at the crew on this ship. Do they seem like drugged wreckage to you? If America suffers from drugs, perhaps you should ask what Am
erica is lacking.”
[“What an asshole,”] Eric King commented suddenly. They ignored him.
Andrei led them up three flights of perforated iron stairs, bracketed to the portholed superstructure of the Charles Nogues. There was an intermittent flow of locals up and down the stairs, with chatting crowds on the landings. Everyone wore the same pocketed jeans and the standard-issue cotton blouses. But a chosen few had plastic shirt-pocket protectors, with pens. Two pens, or three pens, or even four. One guy, a beer-bellied Rasta with a frown and bald spot, had half a dozen gold-plated fibertips. He was followed by a crowd of flunkies. “Whoopee, real Socialism,” Laura muttered at Carlotta.
“I can take the baby if you want.” Carlotta said, not hearing her. “You must be getting tired.”
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.
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