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.
Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets. Grenada could be 1920s Russia, 1940s Germany, 1980s Iran. All it would take was a war.
Of course it wouldn’t be a big war, not nowadays. But even a little terror war could turn things septic in a little place like Grenada. Just enough killing to raise the level of hysteria and make every dissident a traitor. A little war, she thought, like the one beginning to seethe already.…
Andrei stopped. David smiled at him uneasily. “I can see you’ve given this speech before.”
“You are skeptical about talk,” Andrei said, throwing down his napkin. “That’s only wise. But we can show you the facts and the practice.” He paused. “Unless you want to wait for dessert.”
David looked at Laura and Carlotta. “Let’s go,” Laura said. Sweetened scop was nothing to linger for.
They nodded at the crew, thanked the captain politely, left the table. They exited the dining room by another hallway and stopped by a pair of elevators. Andrei punched a button and they stepped in; the doors slid shut behind them.
Static roared in Laura’s head. “Jesus Christ!” David said, clutching his earpiece. “We just went offline!”
Andrei glanced once, over his shoulder, skeptically. “Relax, yes? It’s only a moment. We can’t wire everything.”
“Oh,” David said. He glanced at Laura. Laura stood clutching the tote as the elevator descended. Yeah, they’d lost the armor of television, and here they stood helpless: Andrei and Carlotta could jump them … jab them with knockout needles.… They’d wake up somewhere strapped to tables with dope-crazed voodoo doctors sewing little poisoned time bombs into their brains.…
Andrei and Carlotta stood flat-footed, with the patient, bovine look of people in elevators. Nothing whatever happened.
The doors slid open. Laura and David rushed out into the corridor, clutching their headsets. Long, long seconds of crackling static. Then a quick staccato whine of datapulse. Finally, high-pitched anxious shouting in Spanish.
“We’re fine, fine, just a little break,” Laura told Mrs. Rodriguez. David reassured her at length, in Spanish. Laura missed the words, but not the distant tone of voice: frantic little-old-lady fear, sounding weak and tremulous. Of course, good old Mrs. Rodriguez, she was only worried for them; but despite herself, Laura felt annoyed. She adjusted her glasses and straightened self-consciously.
Andrei was waiting for them, suffering fools gladly, holding a side door. Beyond it was a scrubbing room, with shower stalls and stainless-steel sinks under harsh blue light, and air that smelled of soap and ozone. Andrei yanked open a rubber-sealed locker. Its shelves were stacked with fresh-pressed scrub garments in surgical green: tunics, drawstring pants, hairnets and surgical masks, even little crinkly, tie-on galoshes.
“Mrs. Rodriguez,” David said, excited. “Looks like we need a Rizome bio-tech online.”
Andrei stretched over a sink, catching an automatic drip feed of pink disinfectant. He lathered up vigorously. Beside him, Carlotta caught water in a sterile paper cup. Laura saw her palm a red Romance pill from her purse. She knocked it back with the ease of long practice.
From within her tote, Loretta wrinkled up her little eyes. She didn’t like the scrub room’s light, or maybe it was the smell. She whimpered rhythmically, then began screaming. Her yells echoed harshly from the walls and scared her into new convulsions of effort. “Oh, Loretta,” Laura chided her. “And you’ve been so g
ood lately, too.” She kicked down the tote’s wire rocker stand and rocked it on the floor; but Loretta only turned tomato-red and flung her chubby arms wildly. Laura checked her diaper and sighed. “Can I change her in here, Andrei?”
Andrei was rinsing his neck; he pointed with his elbow at a disposal chute. Laura dug in the back of the tote and unrolled the changing pad from its tube. “That’s cute,” Carlotta said, crowding up and peering over her shoulder. “Like a window shade.”
“Yeah,” Laura said. “See, you press this button on the side, and little bubble-cell padding pops up.” She spread the pad over a laminated counter and set Loretta on it. The baby wailed in existential terror.
Her little kicking rump was caked with shit. By this time, Laura had learned to look at it without really seeing it. She cleaned it deftly with an oiled napkin, not saying anything.
Carlotta was squeamish and looked away, at the tote. “Wow! This thing is really intricate! Hey look, these flaps pop out and you can make it into a baby bath …”
“Hand me the powder, Carlotta.” Laura puffed dry spray on the baby’s rump and sealed her in a new diaper. Loretta howled like a lost soul.
David came up. “You get scrubbed, I’ll take her.” Loretta had one look at her father’s surgical mask and screamed in anguish. “For heaven’s sake,” David said.
[“You shouldn’t take your baby into a bio-hazard zone,”] said a new voice online.
“You don’t think so?” David shouted. “She won’t like wearing the mask, that’s for sure.”
Carlotta looked up. “I could take her,” she said meekly.
[“Don’t trust her,”] online said at once.
“We can’t let the baby out of our sight,” David told Carlotta. “You understand.”
“Well,” Carlotta said practically, “I could wear Laura’s headset. And that way, Atlanta could watch everything I did. And meanwhile Laura would be safe with you.”
Laura hesitated. “My earplug’s custom-made.”
“It’s flexible, I could wear it for a while. C’mon, I can do it, I’d like to.”
“What do you think, online?” David said.
[“It’s me, Millie Syers, from Raleigh,”] online told them. [“You remember. John and I and our boys were in your Lodge, last May.”]
“Oh, hello,” Laura said. “How are you, Professor Syers?”
[“Well, I got over my sunburn.”] Millie Syers laughed. [“And please don’t call me Professor, it’s very non-R. Anyway, if you want my advice, I wouldn’t leave any baby of mine with some data pirate dressed like a hooker.”]
“She is a hooker,” David said. Carlotta smiled.
[“Well! I guess that explains it. Must not see many babies in her line of work.… Hmmm, if she wore Laura’s rig, I suppose I could watch what she did, and if she tries anything I could scream. But what’s to keep her from dropping the glasses and running off with the baby?”]
“We’re in the middle of a supertanker, Millie,” David said. “We got about three thousand Grenadians all around us.”
Andrei looked up from tying his galoshes. “Five thousand, David,” he said, over the baby’s piercing sobs. “Are you not sure you are both carrying this a bit far? All these little quibbles of security?”
“I promise she’ll be all right,” Carlotta said. She raised her right hand, with the center finger bent down into the palm. “I swear it by the Goddess.”
[“Good heavens, she’s one of—”] said Millie Syers, but Laura lost the rest as she stripped off her rig. It felt glorious to have it out of her head. She felt free and clean for the first time in ages; a weird feeling, with the sudden strange urge to jump in a shower stall and soap down.
She locked eyes with Carlotta. “All right, Carlotta. I’m trusting you, with what I love best in the world. You understand that, don’t you? I don’t have to say anything more.”
Carlotta nodded soberly, then shook her head.
Laura scrubbed and got quickly into the gear. The baby’s howling was driving them out of the room.
Andrei ushered them to another elevator, at the back of the scrub room. She looked back one last time at the door and saw Carlotta walking back and forth with the baby, singing.
Andrei stepped in after them, turned his back, and pushed the button. “We’re losing the signal again,” David warned. The steel doors slid shut.
They descended slowly. Suddenly Laura was shocked to feel David tenderly pat her ass. She jumped and stared at him.
“Hey, babe,” he murmured. “We’re offline. Wow.”
He was starved for privacy.
And here they had almost thirty seconds of it. As long as Andrei didn’t turn and look.
She glanced at David in frustration, wanting to tell him … what? To reassure him that it wasn’t so bad. And that she felt it, too. And that they could tough it out together, but he’d better behave himself. And yeah, that it was a funny thing to do, and she was sorry she was jumpy.
But absolutely none of it could get across to him. With the surgical mask and the gold-etched glasses, David’s face had turned totally alien. No human contact.
The doors opened; there was a sudden rush of air and their ears popped. They turned left into another hall. “It’s okay, Millie,” David said distractedly. “We’re fine, leave Carlotta alone.…”
He kept mumbling from behind his mask, shaking his head and talking into the air. Like a madman. It was odd how peculiar it looked when you weren’t doing it yourself. This hall looked peculiar, too: strangely funky and makeshift, the ceiling tilted, the walls out of true. It was cardboard, that was it—brown cardboard and thin wire mesh, but all of it lacquered over with a thick, steel-hard ooze of translucent plastic. The lights overhead were wired with extension cord, cheap old household extension cord, all stapled to the ceiling and sealed under thick lacquered gunk. It was all stapled, there wasn’t a nail in it anywhere. Laura touched the wall, wondering. It was quality plastic, slick and hard as porcelain, and she knew from the feel of it that a strong man couldn’t dent it with an axe.
But there was so much of it—and it cost so much to make! Yeah, but maybe not so much—if you didn’t pay insurance, or worker’s comp, and never shut down for safety inspections, and didn’t build failsafes and crashproof control systems and log every modification in triplicate. Sure; even nuclear power was cheap if you played fast and loose.
But bio-safety rules were ten times as strict, or supposed to be. Maybe plutonium was bad, but at least it couldn’t jump out of a tank and grow by itself.
“This hall is made of cardboard!” David said.
“No, it’s thermal epoxy over cardboard,” Andrei told him. “You see that plug? Live steam. We can boil this entire hall at any moment. Not that we would need to, of course.”
At the hall’s end, they stopped by a tall sealed hatchway. It had the international symbol of bio-hazard: the black-and-yellow, triple-horned circle. Good graphic design, Laura thought as Andrei worked the hatch wheel; as frightening in its elegant way as a skull and crossbones.
They stepped through.
They emerged on a landing of lacquered bamboo. It stood forty feet in the air, overlooking a steel cavern the size of an aircraft hangar. They’d reached a section of the supertanker’s hold; its floor—the steel hull—was gently curved. And littered with surreal machinery, like the careless toys of some giant ten-year-old with a taste for chemistry sets.
The cardboard corridor, and their bamboo landing, and its sloping, spidery catwalks, were all bolted to a monster bulkhead at their backs. The hangar’s far bulkhead rose in the distance, a great gray wall of girder-stiffened steel—this one spread with a giant polychrome mural. A mural of men and women in berets and fatigue shirts, marching under banners, their pie-cut painted eyes as big as basketballs, fixed in midair … their brown arms rounded and monolithic, gleaming like wax in a strange underwater glare.
The hangar’s eerie lighting flowed from liquid chandeliers. They were gla
ss-bottomed steel tubs, big as children’s wading pools, full of cool and oozy radiance. Thick, white, luminescent goo. It threw weird shadows on the dents and ripples of the cardboard ceiling.
It was loud here: industrial chugging and gurgling, with the busy whir of loaded motors and the thrum and squeal of plumbing. The warm, moist air smelled bland and pleasant, like boiled rice. With strange reeks cutting through—the chemical tang of acid, a chalk-dust whiff of lime. A plumber’s dope dream: great towers of ribbed stainless steel, jutting three stories tall, their knobby bases snaked with tubing. Indicator lights in Christmas-tree red and green, glossy readout panels shining like cheap jewelry.… Scores of crew people in white paper overalls—checking readouts, leaning over long, glass-topped troughs full of steamy, roiling oatmeal …
They followed Andrei down the stairs, David carefully scanning everything and mumbling into his set. “Why aren’t they wearing scrub gear?” Laura asked.
“We wear the scrub gear,” Andrei said. “It’s clean down here. But we have wild bugs on our skin.” He laughed. “Don’t sneeze or touch things.”
Three flights down, still above the hull, they detoured onto a catwalk. It led to glass-fronted offices, which overlooked the plant from a bamboo pier.
Andrei led them inside. It was quiet and cool in the offices, with filtered air and electric lights. There were desks, phones, office calendars, a fridge beside stacked cartons of canned Pepsi-Cola. Like an office back in the States, Laura thought, looking around. Maybe twenty years behind the times …
A door marked “PRIVATE” opened suddenly, and an Anglo man backed through it. He was working a pump-piston aerosol spray. He turned and noticed them. “Oh! Hi, uh, Andrei.…”
“Hello,” Laura said. “I’m Laura Webster, this is David, my husband.…”
“Oh, it’s you folks! Where’s your baby?” Unlike everyone they’d seen so far, the stranger wore a suit and tie. It was an old suit, in the flashy “Taipan” style that had been all the rage, ten years ago. “Didn’t want to bring the little guy down here, huh? Well it’s perfectly safe, you needn’t have worried.” He peered at them; light gleamed from his glasses. “You can take off those masks, it’s okay inside here.… You don’t have, like, flu or anything?”
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