“Thirty-six,” the boy said.
“Oh.… Is there a taxi stand near here? I need one.”
“A taxi, is it,” Thirty-six said blankly.
“For the Yung Soo Chim Bank. On Bencoolen Street?”
Agent Thirty-six hissed a little between his teeth. Ali dug out a cigarette.
“Can I have one of those?” Laura said.
Ali lit it and handed it to her, grinning. She took a puff. It tasted like clove-scented burning garbage. She felt her taste buds dying under a lacquer of cancerous spit. Ali was pleased.
“Okay, madam,” said Thirty-six, with a fatalist’s shrug. “I am taking you.” He elbowed Ali out of the rickshaw’s back seat, then gestured to Laura. “Get on, madam. Start pedaling.”
She pedaled briskly out of the docks and a kilometer up Trafalgar Street. Then the skies opened up like a water balloon, and rain came down in unbelievable pounding torrents. She stopped and bought a nickel raincoat from a street-corner vending machine.
She turned up Anson Road, pedaling hard, steaming inside her cheap plastic. Rain sheeted from the wheels and steamed off the sidewalks and gushed down the spotless, trashless gutters.
There were a few old colonial-vintage piles by the docklands: white columns, verandahs, and railings. But as they neared downtown the city began to soar. Anson Road became a narrow defile into a mountain range of steel and concrete and ceramic.
It was like downtown Houston. But more like Houston than even Houston had ever had the nerve to become. It was an anthill, a brutal assault against any sane sense of scale. Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks. Their upper reaches were pocked like waffle irons with triangular bracing. Buttresses, glass-covered superhighways, soared half a mile above sea level.
Story after story rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain.
Here and there the rounded tunnels of Singapore’s mag-lev trains; she saw one flit silently above Tanjong Pagar, wheelless and bright, the carriages gleaming in Singapore’s Coca-Cola white-and-red.
Agent Thirty-six guided her off the street through the automatic doors of a mall. Air conditioning gripped her wet shins. Soon she was pedaling past rank after silent rank of clothing stores, video places, creepy-looking health centers offering cut-rate blood fractionation.
They drove on for over a mile, through ceramic halls thick with garish, brain-damaging ads. Meandering up and down empty ramps, pausing once to enter an elevator. Thirty-six casually popped the rickshaw onto its rear wheels, telescoped the front, and walked it along behind him like a luggage tote.
The malls were almost deserted; an occasional all-night eatery or coffee bar, its sober, well-groomed customers quietly munching their salads under vivid, spiritless murals of daisies and seagulls. Once they saw some cops, Singapore’s finest, in neatly pressed blue Gurkha shorts, with tangle-guns and yard-long lathi sticks.
She no longer knew where the ground was. It didn’t seem to mean much here.
They cruised a walkway. Below them lurked a teenage cycle gang: well-dressed Chinese boys with oiled quiffs, crisp white silk shirts, and gleaming chromed recliner bikes. Thirty-six, who had been lounging in the back with his feet up, sat up and yelled. He shot the boys a series of cryptic gestures, the last unmistakably obscene.
He leaned back again. “Pedal fast,” he urged Laura. The boys downstairs hastily split up into hunting packs.
“Let me pedal,” Thirty-six said. Laura jumped panting into the back. Thirty-six stood on his pedals and the trike took off like a scalded ape. They took corners on two wheels, his hard, plunging legs rasping in their paper trousers.
They crossed the Singapore River half a mile above the ground, inside a glassed-in archway offering snack stands and rented telescopes. Swollen with tropical rain, the little river surged hopelessly in its neatly managed concrete culvert. Something about the sight depressed her enormously.
The rain had stopped by the time they reached Bencoolen Street. Tropical dawn the color of hibiscus was touching the highest steel peaks downtown.
The Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank was a modest little place, 1990s vintage, a mirror-glass office carton, sixty stories high.
There was a line of people outside it a block long. Agent Thirty-six cruised by silently, languidly dodging the automatic taxis. “Wait a minute,” Laura muttered into empty air. “I know these people.”
She’d seen them all before. In the Grenada airport, just after the attack. The vibe was uncanny. The same people—only instead of Yanks and Europeans and South Americans, these were Japanese, Koreans, Southeast Asians. The same mix though—seedy-looking techies, and hustlers with vacant money-eyes, and nasty-looking bullshit artists in wrinkled tropical suits. That same jittery, verminous look of people native to the woodwork and very unhappy outside of it …
Yeah. It was like the world had sloughed off a layer of crime in a bathtub, and this city block was its sink trap, full of suds and hair.
Flotsam, floating garbage, to be racked up and tidied away. Suddenly she imagined the quiet and itchy-looking line of people all lined up and shot. The image gave her a rush of ugly joy. She felt bad. Losing control here. Bad vibrations …
“Stop,” she said. She jumped out of the rickshaw and dodged across the street. She walked deliberately toward the front of the line: a pair of nervous Japanese techs. “Konnichi-wa!” The two men looked at her sullenly. She smiled. “Denwa wa doko ni arimasu ka?”
“If we had a telephone we’d be using it right now,” said the taller Japanese. “And you can knock it off with the high-school nihongo; I’m from Los Angeles.”
“Really?” Laura said. “I’m from Texas.”
“Texas—” His eyes widened. “Jesus, Harvey, look. It’s her. What’s-her-face.”
“Webster,” Harvey said. “Barbara Webster. What the fuck happened to you, girlie? You look like a drowned fucking rat.” He looked over the rickshaw and laughed. “Did you ride here on that little fucking bike?”
“How do I cut through this crap and get to the Net?” she said.
“Why should we tell you?” Los Angeles smirked. “You crucified us in Parliament. You oughta break your goddamn legs.”
“I’m not the Bank’s enemy,” Laura said. “I’m an integrationist. I thought I made that clear in my testimony.”
“Bullshit,” Harvey said. “You telling me there’s room in your little Rizzome for guys who do musketeer chips? Fuck it! Are you as straight as you act? Or were you turned, in Grenada? Me, I figure you’re turned! ’Cause I don’t see how any mama-papa bourgeois democrat is gonna fuck with the P.I.P. out of principle.”
Thirty-six had now successfully crossed the street, towing his folded rickshaw. “You could being more polite to madam,” he suggested.
Los Angeles examined the kid. “Don’t tell me you’re hanging with these little fuckers.…” Suddenly he shrieked and grabbed at his thigh. “Goddamn it! There it is again! Something fucking bit me, man!”
Thirty-six laughed at him. Los Angeles’s face clouded instantly. He aimed a shove at the kid. Thirty-six twisted aside easily. With a muted clack, Thirty-six yanked one of the rickshaw’s lacquered bracing bars from its sockets. He gripped it and smiled, and his shoe-button eyes gleamed like two dollops of axle grease.
Los Angeles stepped backward out of the line and addressed the crowd. “Something stung me!” he screamed. “Like a fucking wasp! And if it was this kid, like I think it was, somebody here ought to break his fucking back! And goddamn it, I’ve been standing out here all night! How come fucking big shots like this chick here get to go right in and, hey! This is that Webster bitch, everybody! Lauren Webster! Pay attention, goddamn it!”
The crowd ignored him, with the inhuman patience of urbanites ignoring a drunk. Thirty-six quietly juggled his bamboo club.
A Tamil
came limping up the pavement. He wore a dhoti, the ethnic skirt of a south Indian. He had a bandage on his bare, dark shin and an ornate walking cane. He gave Harvey a sharp poke with the cane’s rubber tip. “Calming your friend down, la!” he advised. “Behaving like civilized fellows!”
“Fuck you, crip!” Harvey offered indifferently.
An automatic taxi pulled up to the curb and flung open its door.
A mad dog leapt out.
It was a big ugly mongrel that looked half Doberman, half hyena. Its hide was wet and slick, with something thick and oily, like vomit or blood. It erupted from the taxi with a frenzied snarl and tore into the crowd as if fired from a cannon.
It bowled into them, raging. Three men fell screaming. The crowd billowed away in terror.
Laura heard the dog’s jaws snap like castanets. It tore a chunk from a fat man’s forearm, then leapt up with an obscene, desperate wriggle and dashed toward the front of the bank. Great choking barks and shrieks, like some language of the damned. Flesh and shoes slapped damp pavement, the jostle and rush of panic—
The dog leapt six feet into the air, like a hooked marlin. Its fur smoldered. A wedge of flame split it along the spine, bursting its body open.
Flame poured out of it.
It exploded wetly. A grotesque air-burst of steam and stink, spattering the crowd. It flopped to the pavement, dead instantly, a bag of burning flesh. Threads of impossible heat glimmered in it …
Laura was running.
The Tamil had her by the wrist. The crowd was running, everywhere, nowhere, into the streets where taxis screeched to sudden halts with robot honks of protest.… “In here,” the Tamil said helpfully, jumping into a cab.
It was silent inside the cab, air-conditioned. It took a right at the first curb and left the bank behind. The Tamil released her wrist, leaned back, smiled at her.
“Thanks,” Laura said, rubbing her arm. “Thanks a lot, sir.”
“No problem, la,” the Tamil said. “The cab waiting for me.” He paused, then tapped his cast with the cane. “My leg, you see.”
Laura took a deep breath, shuddered. Half a block passed as she got a grip on herself. The Tamil looked her over, his eyes bright. He’d moved very fast for an injured man—he’d almost sprained her wrist, dragging her. “If you hadn’t stopped me, I’d still be running,” she told him gratefully. “You’re very brave.”
“So are you,” he said.
“Not me, no way,” she said. She was trembling.
The Tamil seemed to think it was funny. He nudged his chin with the head of his cane. A languid, dandyish gesture. “Madam, you were fighting in the street with two big data pirates.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “That. That’s nothing.” She paused, embarrassed. “Thanks for taking my part, though.”
“‘An integrationist,’” the Tamil quoted. He was mimicking her. He looked down deliberately. “Oh, look—the nasty voodoo spoilt your nice coat.”
There was a foul splattered blob on Laura’s raincoat sleeve. Red, glistening. She gasped in revulsion and tried to shrug her way out of it. Her arms were caught behind her.…
“Here,” the Tamil said, smiling, as if to help. He held something under her nose. She heard a snap.
A wave of giddy heat touched her face. Then, without warning, she passed out.
A sudden sharp reek dug into Laura’s head. Ammonia. Her eyes watered. “Lights …” she croaked.
The overheads dimmed to murky amber. She felt old, sick, like hours had marched through her on hangover feet. She was half-buried in something—she struggled, sudden claustrophobic rush …
She was lying in a beanbag chair. Like something her grandmother might have owned. The room around her was bluish with the grainy light of televisions.
“You back to the land of the living, Blondie.”
Laura shook her head hard. Her nose and throat felt scorched. “I’m …” She sneezed, painfully. “Goddamn it!” She got her elbows into the shifting pellets of the beanbag and levered herself up.
The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table. The smell of it, ginger and prawns, made her stomach tighten painfully. “Is that you?” she said at last.
He looked down at her. “Who you thinkin’, eh?”
“Sticky?”
“Yeah,” he said, with the chin-swiveling nod of the Tamils. “I and righteous I.”
Laura knuckled her eyes. “Sticky, you’re really different this time … your goddamn cheeks are all wrong and your skin … your hair.… You don’t even sound the same.”
He grunted.
She sat up. “What the hell have they done to you?”
“Trade secrets,” Sticky said.
Laura looked around. The room was small and dark, and it stank. Bare plywood shelving weighted down with tape cassettes, canvas bags, frazzled spools of wiring. Heaps of polyurethane sheeting, and styrofoam noodles, and tangled cellulose.
A bolted wall rack held a dozen cheap Chinese televisions, alive with flickering Singapore street scenes. Against the other wall were heaped dozens of eviscerated cardboard boxes: bright commercial colors, American cornflakes, Kleenex, laundry soap. Gallon paint cans, tubing, rolls of duct tape. Someone had tacked swimsuit shots of Miss Ting inside the grimy kitchenette.
It was hot. “Where the hell are we?”
“Don’t ask,” Sticky said.
“This is Singapore, though, right?” She glanced at her bare wrist. “What time is it?”
Sticky held up the smashed wreckage of her watchphone. “Sorry. Nah sure I could trust it.” He gestured across the table. “Take a seat, memsahib.” He grinned tiredly. “You, I trust.”
Laura got to her feet and made it to the second chair. She leaned on the table. “You know something? I’m goddamn glad to see you. I don’t know why, but I am.”
Sticky shoved her the remnants of his food. “Here, eat. You been out a while.” He scrubbed his plastic fork on a paper napkin and gave it to her.
“Thanks. There a ladies’ room in this dump?”
“Over there,” he nodded. “You feel a sting, back at the Bank? You be sure to check you legs for pinholes in there.”
The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. She had wet herself while unconscious—not badly, luckily, and the stains didn’t show through her Grenadian jeans. She mopped herself with paper and came back. “No pinholes, Captain.”
“Good,” he said, “I’m happy I don’t have to dig one of those Bulgarian pellets out of you ass. What the fock you doin’ in that Bank crowd, anyway?”
“Trying to call David,” she said, “after you screwed up the phones.”
Sticky laughed. “Why you nah have the sense to stay with your Bwana? He nah as stupid as he look—have the sense not to be here, anyway.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Having the time of my life,” he said. “The last time, maybe.” He rubbed his nose—they’d done something to his nostrils, too; they were narrower. “Ten years they train me for something like this. But now I’m here and doin’ it, it’s …”
It seemed to drift away from him then, and he shrugged and waved it past. “I see your testimony, right? Some of it. Too late, but at least you tell them the same things you tell us. Same in Galveston, same in Grenada, same here, same everywhere for you, nah?”
“That’s right, Captain.”
“That’s good,” he said vaguely. “Y’know, wartime … mostly, you do nothing. Time to think … meditate … Like down at the Bank, we know those fockin’ bloodclots hurry down there when the phones shut down, and we know they be just like those bloodclots we got, but to see them … see it happen like that, so predictable …”
“Like wind-up toys,” Laura said. “Like bugs … like they just don’t matter at all.”
He looked at her, surprised. She felt surprised herself. It had been easy to say, sitting there together with him in the darkness. “Yeah,” he said.
“Like toys. Like wind-up toys pretending to have souls.… It’s a wind-up city, this place. Full of lying and chatter and bluff, and cash registers ringin’ round the clock. It’s Babylon. If there ever was a Babylon, it’s here.”
“I thought we were Babylon,” Laura said. “The Net, I mean.”
Sticky shook his head. “These people are more like you than you ever were.”
“Oh,” Laura said slowly. “Thanks, I guess.”
“You wouldn’t do what they did to Grenada,” he said.
“No. But I don’t think it was them, Sticky.”
“Maybe it wasn’t,” he said. “But I don’t care. I hate them. For what they are, for what they want to be. For what they want to make of the world.”
Sticky’s accent had wavered, from Tamil to Islands patois. Now it vanished completely into flat Net English. “You can burn down a country with toys, if you know how. It shouldn’t be true, but it is. You can knock the heart and soul out of people. We know it in Grenada, as well as they do here. We know it better.”
He paused. “All that Movement talk your David thought was cute, cadres and feed the people.… Come the War, it’s gone. Just like that. In that madhouse under Fedon’s Camp, they’re all chewing on each other’s guts. I know I’m getting my orders from that fucker Castleman. That fat hacker, who’s got no real-life at all—just a screen. It’s all principles now. Tactics and strategy. Like someone has to do this, doesn’t matter where or who, just to prove it’s possible.…”
He bent in his chair and rubbed his bare leg, briefly. The cast was gone now, but there were buckle marks on his shin. “They planned this thing in Fedon’s Camp,” he said. “This demon thing, Demonstration Project.… They been working under there for twenty years, Laura, they’ve got tech like …not human. I didn’t know about it—nobody knew about it. I can do things to this city—me, just a few brother soldiers smuggled in, not many—things you can’t imagine.”
“Voodoo,” Laura said.
“That’s right. With the tech they gave us, I can do things you can’t tell from magic.”
“What are your orders?”
He stood up suddenly. “You’re not in them.” He walked into the kitchenette and opened the rust-spotted refrigerator.
Islands in the Net Page 25