“No …” Laura hedged. David emerged from the bathroom carrying the freshly changed baby. Emily quickly swept the vial into a kitchen drawer.
“What’s up?” David said. “You two have that in-joke look again.”
“Just saying how y’all have changed,” Emily told him. “You know something, Dave? Black suits you. You look really good.”
“I put on some weight in Grenada,” David said.
“On you it looks fine.”
He half smiled. “That’s it, flatter the moron.… You two talking company politics, right? Might as well let me hear the worst.” He sat on a black-and-chrome counter stool. “Assuming it’s safe to talk in here …”
“Everyone’s talking about y’all,” Emily said. “You Websters earned beaucoup brownie points on this one.”
“Good. Maybe we can coast a little now.”
“I dunno,” Emily said. “Frankly, you’re gonna be in pretty heavy demand. The Committee wants you for a council session. You’re our situation experts now! And then there’s Singapore.”
“The hell,” David said.
“Singapore’s Parliament is holding open hearings on their data-haven policy. Suvendra’s there right now. She’s been our contact with the Islamic Bank, and she’s going to testify.” Emily paused. “It’s kind of complicated.”
“Suvendra can handle that,” David said.
“Sure,” Emily said, “but if she handles it really well, her Committee election’s a shoe-in.”
David’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute—”
“You don’t know how this has been playing Stateside,” Emily told him. “A month ago it was a side show, but now it’s a major crisis. You heard how Dianne Arbright was talking. A month ago a top-rank journo like Arbright wouldn’t have given me the time of day, but now suddenly we’re sisters, very heavy solidarity.” Emily held up two fingers. “Something’s gonna give, and soon. You can smell it coming. It’s gonna be like Paris ’68, or early Gorbachev. But global.” She was serious. “And we can be right on top of it.”
“We can be six feet fucking under it!” David shouted. “What are you up to? You been talking to those crackpots from Kymera?”
Emily flinched. “Kymera … That corpocracy stuff doesn’t cut much ice with us, but it sure bears watching.… Vienna’s acting screwy.”
“Vienna knows what it’s doing,” David said.
“Maybe, but is it what we want?” Emily pulled plates and plasticware. “I think Vienna’s waiting. They’re gonna let it get bad this time—until somebody, somewhere, gives them political carte blanche. To clean house, globally. A new world order, and a new world army.”
“I don’t like it,” David said.
“It’s what we have now, but without the ratholes.”
“I like ratholes.”
“In that case, you’d better go talk some sense to Singapore.” The microwave dinged. “It’s only for a few days, David. And Singapore’s got a real government, not some goofy criminal front like Grenada’s. Your testimony to their Parliament could make a major difference in their policy. Suvendra says—”
David’s face turned leaden. “We’re gonna get killed,” he said. “Don’t you understand that yet? All the little ratholes are gonna be battle zones. There are people out there who would kill us for nothing at all, and if they can kill us for profit, they’re thrilled! And they know who we are, that’s what scares me. We’re valuable now.…”
He rubbed his stubbled cheek. “We’re getting the hell out of here, into a Lodge or a Retreat, and if you want to take care of Singapore, Emily, well, call Vienna and finance Rizome’s Fightin’ Armor Division. ’Cause they mean business these pirates and we’re never gonna sweet-talk ’em into anything! Not till we put a tank on every fucking street corner! Until we find the sons-of-bitches who pressed the buttons that killed those drowned little kids in Grenada. But not my kid! Never again!”
Laura punctured the foil over her steaming chicken almondine. She felt no appetite. Those drowned bodies … stiff and dead and moving on dark currents … dark currents of rage. “He’s right,” she said. “Not my Loretta. But one of us has to go. To Singapore.”
David gaped. “Why?”
“Because we’re needed there, that’s why. Because it has what we want,” she said. “Power to control our own lives. And the real answers. The truth!”
David stared at her. “The truth. You think you can get it? You think you’re that important?”
“I’m not important,” Laura said. “I know I’m nothing much now—the sort of person who gets pushed around, insulted, and has her house shot up. But I might make myself important, if I worked at it. It could happen. If Suvendra needs me, I’m going.”
“You don’t even know Suvendra!”
“I know she’s Rizome, and I know she’s fighting for us. We can’t turn our backs on an associate. And whoever shot up our Lodge is going to pay for it.”
The baby started to whimper. David slumped in his chair. He spoke very quietly. “What about us, Laura—you and me and Loretta? You could die over there.”
“This isn’t just for the company—it’s for us! Running away can’t make us safe.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” David said. “Stand on the dock and blow kisses? While you sail off to make the world safe for democracy?”
“So what? Women always did that in wartime!” Laura struggled to lower her voice. “You’re needed here anyway, to counsel the Committee. I’ll go to Singapore.”
“I don’t want you to go.” He was trying to be curt and tough, lay it down in front of Emily like an ultimatum, but all the force was out of it. He was afraid for her, and it was half a plea.
“I’ll come back and I’ll be fine,” she said. The words sounded like a reassurance, instead of a refusal. But he wasn’t any less hurt.
Taut silence. Emily looked wretched. “Maybe this isn’t the time to talk about it. You’ve both been under a lot of strain. No one says you’re acting non-R.”
“They wouldn’t have to say it,” Laura said. “We know how to feel it without any words.”
David spoke up. “You’re going to do it no matter what I say to you, aren’t you.”
It was no use hesitating now. Better to get it over with. “Yes. I have to,” she told him. “It’s gotten to me now. It’s inside me, David. I’ve seen too much of it. If I don’t work through this somehow, I’ll never really sleep again.”
“Well,” he said. “Then it’s no use arguing, is it? This is where I beat you into submission, or threaten divorce.” He got off his bar-stool, jerkily, and began pacing. Wired with tension, his feet sluffing the carpet. Somehow she forced herself to stay quiet and let him struggle with himself.
At last he spoke aloud. “I guess we’re in the thick of it now, whether we like it or not. Hell, for all we know, half of Rizome’s on some terrorists’ hit list, just because we took a stand. If we cower to criminals, we’ll never live it down.” He stopped and looked at her.
She’d won. She felt her face, set stiff and stubbornly, break into a smile. Helpless and radiant, a smile for him. She was very proud of him. Proud just because of what he was; and proud, too, that Emily had seen it.
He sat on his barstool again and locked eyes with her. “But you’re not going,” he told her. “I am.”
She took his hand and looked at it, held it in her fingers. Good, strong, warm hand. “That’s not how it works with us,” she told him gently. “You’re the idea man, David. I’m the one who hustles people.”
“Let me get shot,” he said. “I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you. I mean that.”
She hugged him hard. “Nothing will happen, sweetheart. I’ll just do the goddamned job. And I’ll come back. Covered with glory.”
He broke away from her, got to his feet. “You won’t even give me that much, will you?” He headed for the door. “I’m going out.”
Emily opened her mouth. Laura grabbed her arm. Davi
d left the apartment.
“Let him go,” Laura said. “He’s like that when we fight. He needs it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Laura felt close to tears. “It’s been real bad for us. All that time online. He has to blow off some steam.”
“You’re just jet-lagged. And Net-burned. I’ll get you some Kleenex.”
“I’m better with him, usually.” She forced a smile. “But right now I’m on-rag.”
“Oh, gosh.” Emily gave her a tissue. “No wonder.”
“Sorry.”
Emily touched her shoulder gently. “I always hassle you with my problems, Laura. But you never lean on me. Always so controlled. Everyone says so.” She hesitated. “You and David need some time together.”
“We’ll have all the time in the world when I get back.”
“Maybe you ought to think it over.”
“It’s no use, Emily. We can’t get away from it.” She wiped her eyes. “It was something Stubbs told me, before they killed him. One world means there’s no place to hide.” She shook her head, tossed her hair back, forced the sting in her eyes to fade. “Hell, Singapore’s just a phone call away. I’ll call David from there every day. Make it up to him.”
Singapore.
7
Singapore. Hot tropic light slanted through brown wooden shutters. A ceiling fan creaked and wobbled, creaked and wobbled, and dust motes did a slow atomic dance above her head.
She was on a cot, in an upstairs room, in an elderly waterfront barn. Rizome’s HQ in Singapore—the Rizome godown.
Laura sat up, reluctantly, blinking. Thin wood-grain linoleum, cool and tacky under her sweating feet. The siesta had made her head hurt.
Massive steel I-beams pierced through floor and ceiling, their whitewash peeling over lichen patches of rust. The walls around her were piled high with bright, unstable heaps of crates and cardboard boxes. Canned hairspray that was bad for the atmosphere. Ladies’ beauty soap full of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Quack tonics of zinc and ginseng that claimed to cure impotence and clarify the spleen. All this evil crap had come with the place when the previous owners went bankrupt. Suvendra’s Rizome crew refused to market it.
Sooner or later they would toss it out and take the loss, but in the meantime a clan of geckos had set up housekeeping in the nooks and crannies. Geckos—wall-walking lizards with pale, translucent skins, and slitted eyes, and swollen-fingered paws. Here came one now, picking its way stealthily across the water-stained ceiling. It was the big matronly-looking one that liked to crouch overhead by the light fixture. “Hello, Gwyneth,” Laura called to it, and yawned.
She checked her wrist. Four P.M. She was still far behind on her sleep, hurry and worry and jet lag, but it was time to get up and get back after it.
She stepped into her jeans, straightened her T-shirt. Her deck sat on a small folding table, behind a big woven basket of paper flowers. Some Singapore politico had sent Laura the bouquet as a welcome gift. Customary. She’d kept it, though, because she’d never seen paper flowers like they made here in Singapore. They were extremely elegant, almost scary looking in their museum-replica perfection. Red hibiscus, white chrysanthemum, Singapore’s national colors. Beautiful and perfect and unreal. They smelled like French cologne.
She sat, and turned the deck on, and loaded data. Pop-topped a jug of mineral water and poured it in a dragon-girdled teacup. She sipped, and studied her screen, and was absorbed.
The world around her faded. Into black glass, green lettering. The inner world of the Net.
PARLIAMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF SINGAPORE
Select Committee on Information Policy
Public hearings, October 9, 2023
COMMITTEE CHAIR
S. P. Jeyaratnam, M.P. (Jurong), P.I.P.
VICE-CHAIR
Y. H. Leong, M.P. (Moulmein), P.I.P.
A. bin Awang, M.P. (Bras Basah), P.I.P.
T. B. Pang, M.P. (Queenstown), P.I.P.
C. H. Quah, M.P. (Telok Blangah), P.I.P.
Dr. R. Razak, M.P. (Anson), Anti-Labour Party
Transcript of Testimony
MR. JEYARATNAM: … accusations scarcely less than libelous!
MRS. WEBSTER: I’m well aware of the flexibility of the local laws of libel.
MR. JEYARATNAM: Are you slurring the integrity of our legal system?
MRS. WEBSTER: Amnesty International has a list of eighteen local political activists, bankrupted or jailed through your Government’s libel actions.
MR. JEYARATNAM: This committee will not be used as a globalist soapbox! Could you apply such high standards to your good friends in Grenada?
MRS. WEBSTER: Grenada is an autocratic dictatorship practicing political torture and murder, Mr. Chairman.
MR. JEYARATNAM: Indeed. But this has not prevented you Americans from cosying up to them. Or from attacking us: a fellow industrial democracy.
MRS. WEBSTER: I’m not a United States diplomat, I’m a Rizome associate. My direct concern is with your corporate policies. Singapore’s information laws promote industrial piracy and invasion of privacy. Your Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank may have a better screen of legality, but it’s damaged my company’s interests as badly as the United Bank of Grenada. If not more so. We don’t want to offend your pride or your sovereignty or whatever, but we want those policies changed. That’s why I came here.
MR. JEYARATNAM: You equate our democratic government with a terrorist regime.
MRS. WEBSTER: I don’t equate you, because I can’t believe that Singapore is responsible for the vicious attack that I saw. But Grenadians do believe it, because they know full well that you and they are rivals in piracy, and so you have a motive. And for revenge, I think … I know, that they are capable of almost anything.
MR. JEYARATNAM: Anything? How many battalions does this witch doctor have?
MRS. WEBSTER: I can only tell you what they told me. Just before I left, a Grenadian cadre named Andrei Tarkovsky gave me a message for you. (Mrs. Webster’s testimony deleted)
MR. JEYARATNAM: Order, please! This is rank terrorist propaganda.… Chair recognizes Mr. Pang for a motion.
MR. PANG: I move that the subversive terrorist message be stricken from the record.
MRS. QUAH: Second the motion.
MR. JEYARATNAM: It is so ordered.
DR. RAZAK: Mr. Chairman, I wish to be recorded as objecting to this foolish act of censorship.
MRS. WEBSTER: Singapore could be next! I saw it happen! Legalisms—that won’t help you if they sow mines through your city and firebomb it!
MR. JEYARATNAM: Order! Order, please, ladies and gentlemen.
DR. RAZAK: … a kind of innkeeper?
MRS. WEBSTER: We in Rizome don’t have “jobs,” Dr. Razak. Just things to do and people to do them.
DR. RAZAK: My esteemed colleagues of the People’s Innovation Party might call that “inefficient.”
MRS. WEBSTER: Well, our idea of efficiency has more to do with personal fulfillment than, uh, material possessions.
DR. RAZAK: I understand that large numbers of Rizome employees do no work at all.
MRS. WEBSTER: Well, we take care of our own. Of course a lot of that activity is outside the money economy. An invisible economy that isn’t quantifiable in dollars.
DR. RAZAK: In ecu, you mean.
MRS. WEBSTER: Yes, sorry. Like housework: you don’t get any money for doing it, but that’s how your family survives, isn’t it? Just because it’s not in a bank doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Incidentally, we’re not “employees,” but “associates.”
DR. RAZAK: In other words, your bottom line is ludic joy rather than profit. You have replaced “labour,” the humiliating specter of “forced production,” with a series of varied, playlike pastimes. And replaced the greed motive with a web of social ties, reinforced by an elective power structure.
MRS. WEBSTER: Yes, I think so … if I understand your definitions.
DR. RAZAK: How long before you can dispos
e of “work” entirely?
Singha Pura meant “Lion City.” But there had never been lions on Singapore island.
The name had to make some kind of sense, though. So local legend said the “lion” had been a sea monster.
On the opposite side of Singapore’s National Stadium, a human sea lifted their flash cards and showed Laura their monster. The Singapore “merlion,” in a bright mosaic of cardboard squares.
Loud, patriotic applause from a packed crowd of sixty thousand.
The merlion had a fish’s long, scaled body and the lion head of the old British Empire. They had a statue of it in Merlion Park at the mouth of the Singapore River. The thing was thirty feet high, a genuinely monstrous hybrid.
East and West—like cats and fishes—never the twain shall meet. Until some bright soul had simply chopped the fish’s head off and stuck the lion’s on. And there you had it: Singapore.
Now there were four million of them and they had the biggest goddamn skyscrapers in the world.
Suvendra, sitting next to Laura in the bleachers, offered her a paper bag of banana chips. Laura took a handful and knocked back more lemon squash. The stadium hawkers were selling the best fast food she’d ever eaten.
Back across the field there was another practiced flurry. A big grinning face this time, flash-card pixels too big and crude, like bad computer graphics.
“It is the specimen they are showing,” Suvendra said helpfully. Tiny little Malay woman in her fifties, with oily hair in a chignon and frail, protuberant ears. Wearing a yellow sundress, tennis hat, and a Rizome neck scarf. Next to her a beefy Eurasian man chewed sunflower seeds and carefully spat the hulls into a small plastic trash bag.
“The what?” Laura said.
“Spaceman. Their cosmonaut.”
“Oh, right.” So that was Singapore’s astronaut, grinning from his space helmet. It looked like a severed head stuck in a television.
A roar from the western twilight. Laura cringed. Six matte-black pterodactyls buzzed the stadium. Nasty-looking things. Combat jets from the Singapore Air Force, the precision flyers, Chrome Angels or whatever they called themselves. The jets spat corkscrewed plumes of orange smoke from their canted wing tips. The crowd jumped gleefully to their feet, whooping and brandishing their programs.
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