“Oh.” She wiped her palms on the carpet, absently. Drenched. “How long was it?”
“You talked for ninety minutes. I think I can edit it down to an hour.”
Ninety minutes. It had felt like ten. “How was I?”
“Amazing.” He was respectful. “That business when they buzzed the camp—that’s the sort of thing nobody could fake.”
She was puzzled. “What?”
“You know. When the jets came over just now.” He stared at her. “Jets. The Malians just buzzed the camp.”
“I didn’t even hear it.”
“Well, you looked up, Laura. And you waited. Then you went right on talking.”
“The demon had me,” she said. “I don’t even know what the hell I said.” She touched her cheek. It came away black with mascara. Of course—she’d been weeping. “I’ve run my makeup all over my goddamn face! And you let me.”
“Cinema verité,” he said. “It’s real. Raw and real. Like a live grenade.”
“Then throw it,” she told him. Giddily. She let herself go and fell back where she sat. Her head hit a buried rock under the carpet, but the dull jolt of pain seemed a central part of the experience.
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” he said. There was real fear in his voice. It was as if, for the first time, he had realized he had something to lose. “It might just happen—it could get loose in the Net. People might really believe it.” He shifted uneasily where he sat. “I’ve gotta figure the angles first. What if Vienna falls? That would be great, but they might just reform and come back with bigger teeth this time. In which case I’ve fucked myself and everything I’ve tried to create here. Crap like that can happen, when you throw live grenades.”
“It has to get loose,” she said passionately. “It will get loose, sometime. FACT knows, Vienna knows, maybe even governments.… A secret this huge is bound to come out, sooner or later. It’s not just our doing. We just happen to be the people on the spot.”
“I like that line of reasoning, Laura. It’ll sound good if they catch us.”
“That doesn’t matter. Anyway, they can’t touch us, if everybody learns the truth! Come on, Gresham! You’ve got goddamn satellites, think of a way to get though, damn it!”
He sighed. “I already have,” he said. He got to his feet and walked past her, unrolling a spool of cable. After a moment she rose on one elbow and looked out the triangular pie slice of door, after him. It was late afternoon now, and the Tuaregs were throwing two of the domes onto their backs. Yawning teacup mouths open to the dry Saharan sky.
Gresham came back. He looked down at her as she sprawled on the carpet, breathing. “You okay?”
“I’m hollow. Eviscerated. Absolved.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You talked just like that, the whole time.” He sat cross-legged before his console and typed away, carefully.
Minutes passed.
A woman’s voice erupted from the console.
“Attention North Africa broadcast source, latitude eighteen degrees, ten minutes, fifteen seconds; longitude five degrees, ten minutes, eighteen seconds. You are broadcasting on a frequency reserved for the International Communications Convention for military use. You are advised to desist at once.”
Gresham cleared his throat. “Is Vassily there?”
“Vassily?”
“Yeah. Da.”
“Da, okay, looking good, hold on, please.”
Moments later a man’s voice came on. His English wasn’t as good as the woman’s. “Is Jonathan, right?”
“Yeah. How’s it goin’?”
“Very well, Jonathan! You are receiving the tapes I sent?”
“Yes, Vassily, thank you, spaseba, you’re very generous. As always. I have something very special for you this time.”
The voice was cautious. “Very special, Jonathan?”
“Vassily, this is an item beyond price. Unobtainable elsewhere.”
Unhappy silence. “I must ask, can it wait for our next pass over your area. We are having small docking problem here at the moment. Very small docking problem.”
“I really think you’d better give this one your immediate attention, Vassily.”
“Very well. I will key in scrambler.” Moment’s wait. “Ready for transmission.”
Gresham tapped his console. High-pitched whir. He leaned back, turning to Laura. “This’ll take a while. The scramblers are kind of clunky up on old Gorbachev Memorial.”
“That was the Russian space station?”
“Yeah.” Gresham rubbed his hands briskly. “Things are looking up.”
“You just sent our tape to a cosmonaut?”
“Yeah.” He tucked in his legs, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’ll tell you what I think might happen. They’re gonna look at it up there. They’re gonna think it’s craziness—at first. But they may believe it. And if they do, they won’t be able to hold it back. Because the consequences are just too extreme.
“So—they’ll pipe it down to Moscow, and that other place, Star City. And the ground teams will look it over, and the apparatchiks. And they’ll copy it. Not because they think there ought to be a lot of copies, but because it needs study. And they’re gonna start shipping it all around. To Vienna first, of course, because their people are all over Vienna. But to the rest of the Socialist bloc, too—just in case …”
He yawned into his fist. “And then those guys on the station are going to realize they’ve got the publicity coup of a lifetime. And if anyone’s willing to fool with it, they are. I’ve got a lot of contacts, here and there, but they’re the craziest bastards I know! Five will get you ten, they start dumping it, direct broadcast. If they can get permission from Star City. Or maybe even without permission.”
“I don’t understand, Gresham. Direct broadcast? That just sounds lunatic.”
“You don’t know what it’s like up there! Wait a minute, you do know—you’ve lived on a submarine. But see, they’ve been just burning, ever since little Singapore threw that guy up with the laser launch. Because they’ve been up there for years, hanging their ass on the edge of the infinite, and nobody paying attention. Didn’t you hear how pathetic Vassily was? Like some ham-radio geezer locked in a basement.”
“But they’re cosmonauts! They’re trained professionals, they do space science. Biology. Astronomy.”
“Yeah. Lot of girls and glory in those two. Boy.” Gresham shook his head. “I give it three days at the outside.”
“Okay … what then? If it doesn’t work.”
“I call ’em again. Threaten to give it to somebody else. There are other contacts.… And we still have the original tape. We just keep trying, that’s all. Till we get through. Or Vienna nails us. Or till FACT makes a demonstration on a city and makes the news obvious to everyone. Which is what we have to expect, isn’t it?”
“My God! What we’ve just done could cause … worldwidepanic.…”
He sneered. “Yeah—I’m sure that’s what Vienna has been telling itself while they sat on the truth. For years. And covered up, and protected the people who shot up your house.”
A bolt of rage short-circuited her fear. “That’s right!”
He grinned at her. “It was one of the least of their crimes, actually. But I figured it’d bring you around.”
She thought aloud. “Vienna let them do it. They knew who killed Stubbs and they came into my house and lied to me. Because they were afraid of something worse.”
“Worse? I’ll say. Think of the political consequences. Vienna exists to keep order against terrorism, and they’ve been sucking up to terries for years. They’re gonna pay. The hypocrites.”
“But Gresham, what if they start bombing people? Millions could die.”
“Millions? Depends on how many warheads they have. They’re not a superpower. Five warheads? Ten? How many launch racks in that submarine?”
“But they could really do it! They could murder whole cities of innocent people while they’re
sleeping, peacefully.… For no sane reason! Just stupid fascist politics and power mongering—” Her voice caught hoarsely.
“Laura—I’m older than you. I know that situation. I remember it vividly.” He smiled. “I’ll tell you how it worked. We just waited and went on living, that’s all. It didn’t happen—maybe it’ll never happen. In the meantime, what good is this doing you?” He stood up. “We’re through here. Come with me, there are things I want you to see.”
She followed him unwillingly, feeling wretched, spooked. The way he talked about it so casually—ten warheads—but for him it was casual, wasn’t it? He’d lived through a time where there were thousands of warheads, enough to exterminate all human life.
Responsible for mass death. It filled her with loathing. Her thoughts raced and suddenly she wanted to flee into the desert, vaporize. She never wanted to be near anyone who had ever touched such a thing, who was shadowed by that kind of horror.
And yet they were everywhere, weren’t they? People who’d played politics with atomic weapons. Presidents, premiers, generals … little old men out in parks with grandkids and golf clubs. She had seen them, lived among them—
She was one of them.
Her mind went numb.
Gresham slowed, took her elbow. “Look.”
It was evening now. A ragged crowd of about a hundred had gathered before one of the domes. The dome had been pulled in half, as a kind of crude amphitheater. The Inadin musicians were playing again, and one of them stood before the crowd, swaying, singing. His song had a wailing meter and many verses. The other Inadin swayed in time, sometimes giving a sharp cry of approval. The crowd looked on open-mouthed.
“What’s he saying?”
Gresham began speaking again in his television voice. He was reciting poetry.
Listen, people of the Kel Tamashek,
We are the Inadin, the blacksmiths.
We have always wandered among the tribes and clans,
We have always carried your messages.
Our fathers’ lives were better than ours,
Our grandfathers’ better still.
Once our people traveled everywhere,
Kano, Zanfara, Agadez.
Now we live in the cities and are turned into numbers and letters,
Now we live in the camps and eat magic food from tubes.
Gresham stopped. “Their word for magic is tisma. It means, ‘the secret craft of blacksmiths.’”
“Go on,” she said.
Our fathers had sweet milk and dates,
We have only nettles and thorns.
Why do we suffer like this?
Is it the end of the world?
No, because we are not evil men,
No, because now we have tisma.
We are blacksmiths who have secret magic,
We are silversmiths who see the past and future.
In the past this was a rich and green land,
Now it is rock and dust.
Gresham paused, watching the Tuaregs. Two rose and began dancing, their outstretched arms curling and waving, their sandaled feet stamping in time. It was slow, waltzlike dancing, elegant, elegiac. The singer rose to his feet again. “Now comes the good part,” Gresham said.
But where there is rock, there can be grass,
Where there is grass, the rain comes.
The roots of grass will hold the rain,
The leaves of grass will tame the sandstorm.
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.”
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