Contraband

by George Foy

  It had something to do with the .667 ratio, Hawkley said, but what? He had lit up the second joint but was not smoking it. The wrinkles around his eyes looked deep as trenches in the kerosene light.

  He did have one piece of specific info, Hawkley said: a name. The coal of the spliff glowed as he continued. The name was Peter Brodin, and it belonged to a mid-level nobody, a fifty-eight-year-old programmer who had put Control together. ‘Supposedly a fan of Derrida, and Lacan, those University of Paris post-structuralist types,’ Hawkley said, ‘though what that’s s’posed to tell you . . .’ he shrugged. Brodin, he continued – a man no one knew personally – by virtue of his invention had become the most powerful individual in the enforcement wing of BON.

  ‘There’s a way to find this pig,’ Hawkley grunted, scratching arrows on the planks with his Zippo to illustrate the point, ‘but you can’t do it virtual, all the best hackers have tried, they can’t break through BON’s immune-programs. So you got to do it physical. Which means you want to find him at his workstation, capish? That way you can see how it works, and figure out how to perpetrate his system. So you go to his office, which is in the BON complex at Fort Meade, Maryland; though most of the time he’s at their science office at the TransCom Building, in New York.’

  It took a second or two to sink in, in this context. But when it did the ‘what?’ came blurting from the pilot like a belch.

  ‘The TransCom Building.’ Hawkley glanced at him in surprise. ‘You must know it, it’s—’

  ‘I know it. I used to live there.’

  ‘Good. Then you’ll know your way around,’ Hawkley replied, comfortably.

  Inside the longhouse the noise level was rising again. The emptied crates had been stacked to one side. The men and women gathered around the central pole, the one with the strings leading down from the top to the painted crate. The women were chanting and clapping. The smoky light reacted with the smoky tones of their skin and turned the whole longhouse into a show of fog and shadows.

  ‘But why?’ the pilot said without taking his eyes off the crowd inside. ‘Why is he at the TransCom?’

  Hawkley exhaled, a long feather of over-sweet smoke.

  ‘Because it’s all X-Corp software, man,’ he said, ‘and X-Corp belongs to TransCom now. BON uses Fujitsu-Cray 7300-series mainframes, all fornicated and copulated and parallel-processed together. X-Corp and BON worked together for years, pimp-’n’-hooker. X-Corp comes up with a new security network; BON buys it, tests it for ’em. That’s how Stanley got to be called “Bokon.” Bokon, it’s Vodun for “Sorcerer”, and “Taylay” means television, and by extension, electronic messages, even e-mail in Kriol; he tested his first system on the reefer-runners of Cap Haitien.’

  ‘No wonder,’ the pilot was saying, ‘I used to get all that BON traffic so clear—’ but at that point, inside the longhouse, a man with a snowy afro, dressed in cut-off jeans, climbed creakily to the top of the desk, and began to shout.

  ‘Long long moontime we hangin’ on for John Frum. Now him come again, hallelujah and by the way.’ (‘By the way,’ the women answered in a sweet singsong.)

  ‘Now John Frum bring us-bilong-cargo from German Town; straight from Time-before-tabu him come, hallelujah and by the way.’ (‘By the way.’)

  ‘Him come on mighty steamer-that-fly’ – the old man’s voice rose – ‘an’ soon cargo is bilong-men. Soon come cargo-bilong-Dakota, and Fokker, and De Havilland; yea, even come Boeing, hallelujah an’ by the way.’

  ‘Boeing-of-the-night,’ the women chanted, swaying their breasts like orchids in a seawind.

  ‘I speak finish,’ the old man said. ‘Now sing strong-fella, and no forget what I say; hallelujah and by the way.’

  The women danced, and the men lifted up a couple of long black cases with fat square scopes and dials and eyepieces sticking out from the fiberglass, and all answered, ‘By the way.’

  ‘What the fuck,’ the pilot said, ‘is going on in there?’

  ‘That,’ said Hawkley, ‘is “Cargo religion.”’

  The pilot just looked at him.

  The people inside began to sing again. Their voices were strong; the bamboo of the porch swayed as they moved their feet in rhythm. Men beat on drums made of strong wood and carved to represent evil spirits. The complicated fiberglass tubes were set at a place of honor on the bamboo desks. Hawkley got up to fetch more kava.

  ‘It illustrates what I meant,’ Hawkley said when he came back. ‘These people – the Watap – belong to an old culture, but they’ve always been real poor, and the Dutch, who colonized this island, made ’em even poorer. Took the good lands for copra, taxed ’em, beat on ’em. And the Watap would hear about the amazing cheung Whitney owned, like radios and iceboxes and cars. And they would look up from their shitass manioc patch and see the airplanes and steamers bringing these goodies, and the airplanes and steamers always passed them by, “by the way,” far away on the horizon, high up in the sky. They couldn’t understand it so, like any dying culture, you name it, the Ghost Shirts, the Maji-Maji, the Moonies, this new Hoffa cult, whatever, they made up a story to explain it; in this case, the Myth of Cargo. Which was, that all the goodies actually are made in some distant Cargo heaven, and they are made by gods for the Watap, but somewhere along the way the goodies get hijacked by the whites. The Watap decided that paradise will come when the messiah of Cargo redirects the cargo home.’

  ‘By the way,’ the Watap chanted, so loud, the kerosene lamp swayed.

  Hawkley drained the kava gourd. His eyes glinted in the torchlight.

  ‘Anyway, the Cargo witch doctors checked out the whites doing all the weird things whites do, and figured these had to be rituals to make the cargo come. So they copied ’em. They built fake airfields, in the jungle; they built bogus seaplanes and C-47s out of bamboo, to attract planes. They built fake wharves, like this one, to tempt in ships. They built “radiotelephones,”’ he pointed at the pole inside, ‘to talk to the gods of Cargo. They constructed “offices” and shuffled banana leaves back and forth, like they knew whites did. They searched the sky hopefully for planes. But nothing worked.

  ‘The first time I came here, man,’ Hawkley continued dreamily, ‘I thought, shit, this is perfect – like, California’s full of people like these.’

  The pilot had been looking at the long fiberglass tubes, going from half-familiar detail to detail till it all suddenly came together and he said, ‘Those are Blowpipes, Hawkley – surface-to-air missiles. Handheld. Wire-guided.’

  ‘You grokked it, man.’ Hawkley chuckled into his gourd, a little embarrassed. ‘Yeah, I figured – for the first time, they could really get their own cargo. ’Bout time, huh?’

  ‘But they’re gonna shoot down planes with that, Hawkley!’ the pilot yelled. ‘They’re gonna kill pilots! We won’t know what the fuck hit us, when those things go off.’

  ‘Don’t get so fuckin’ sanctimonious, kid.’ Hawkley’s eyes grew hot and he looked at the pilot directly now. ‘Djakarta’s been wiping out these people for years. They want independence, but the Indonesians won’t give it to ’em. The Indonesians use A-10 Warthog ground attack planes the Pentagon gives ’em. Eurofighters from the EU. They drop ball-bearing bombs, which are outlawed by the Geneva Convention, and napalm. It’s self-defense.’

  ‘Maybe,’ the pilot said doubtfully. Looking at the Blowpipes, he thought about the terror in the pit of him when the AMRAAM flashed by the Citation’s cockpit in the heart of the storm. It felt like years ago. ‘So you’re the Cargo messiah,’ he said. ‘You’re some kind of god to these people?’

  Hawkley laughed. ‘They don’t treat me like a god.’

  ‘But you bring ’em the cargo.’

  ‘I get paid for it, man. Not much, considering, but I do get paid. Actually these people kinda despise me. After all, I’m only returning what my people ripped off to begin with. And then I leave. Gods aren’t s’posed to leave.’

  ‘I found that out,’ Ela said from the entra
nce behind them, ‘twenty years ago.’

  Hawkley swiveled, fast, like he’d been shot in one shoulder. His kava gourd rolled off the dock and, after two or three seconds, splashed in the water beneath.

  Ela stood hunched at the entrance, staring down at her father.

  ‘Pookie,’ Hawkley said a whiny sort of tone.

  ‘I’ll split,’ the pilot offered.

  ‘No need,’ Hawkley said desperately.

  ‘I want to talk to him,’ Ela told the pilot.

  ‘Don’t go far,’ Hawkley said. ‘We’re dropping all of you off in the morning, near Manila.’

  The pilot turned to leave, turned back. ‘One thing—’

  ‘What.’

  ‘I want my ECM-pak. Abd el Haq – you – took it in Chitral.’

  ‘I dig,’ Hawkley said, ‘it’s on the Silubloan,’ but his eyes were on his daughter, and his voice was already raveled in the complexities of what he was going to say to her.

  *

  The pilot climbed down the ladder to the beach. Above his head the Watap had softened their chant to a long, slow rhythm: by-the-way, by-the-way, by-the-way. The air was even more dense than before.

  The coral sand felt warm underfoot. Foliage hung over the beach, over the lagoon, like a canopy bed. The mist still glowed in the death of moonlight. The water seemed to pulse, to shine electric under and beyond the small shafts of torchlight from the wharf. When the pilot took off his boots and waded in, he found his feet made ripples of light that illuminated the sand on which he stood.

  Phosphorescence. He had never seen it so strong.

  He took off the rest of his clothes and dove, heedless of the potential peril in waters unfamiliar as these. The lagoon was a perfect temperature – no shock, yet cool enough to stroke every cell of his epidermis. He was still weak from the flu, but the sea felt good, like a massage, pulling from his muscles strength that he could use for swimming. He dove deep, eyes open, seeing the millions of tiny piezoelectric plankton blooping softly past his face. It was like diving at a hundred m.p.h. the wrong way down a night-time highway at rush hour. Pressure popped in his ears. Enough light emanated from the organisms and torchlight and the mist for him to perceive his surroundings underwater.

  The bottom of the lagoon appeared, shimmering up blue-green, studded with brain coral. A silver-blue cross hung beside a large clump of wavy coral to his right. The angle of the cross was too perfect to be natural. He kicked over. The cross seemed to recede, then magnify. As he swam deeper it grew into gigantic wings and a fuselage. Four bent props. He recognized the swept-back tail, the greenhouse canopy, from his model kits. A B-17.

  Coming to the limits of his air now, he accelerated the kicks, sweeping water with great otter scoops of his hands. Down to the cockpit. The plane was unbelievably huge in the lens of water.

  Holding on briefly to a round strut that once held glass, he saw the algae crusting thick over the round shape of dials, the empty framework of seats, the throttles. Kicking a little to stay in position, he disturbed plankton inside the wreck and they put out light in their unrest. In the added light he made out a patch of pearl in the jumpseat behind the copilot’s position; and out of the scummy green darkness, in the directionless glow of micro-organisms, he discerned the sheen of cheekbones, and teeth, and long, graceful vertebrae, still laced to the backrest with some kind of webbing. Shreds of leather fabric remained belted around the ribcage; above it all, strands of hair, three or four feet long, waved just a touch in the corrupted water.

  The last of the pilot’s oxygen blew from his mouth. He headed for the surface, hands grabbing at the reflections above him like they were the last light left before darkness finally and irretrievably closed in around him.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  ‘In each of these men . . . Mozart lies, assassinated.’

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  Terre des Hommes

  Marco decided to hang around Pulau Karang. The waterskiing possibilities of the lagoon were too good to ignore, he believed. The Watap’s code of hospitality ran too deep to refuse him.

  Hawkley’s Flying Boat dropped off the pilot, Ela, and Rocketman the next day on an island thirty miles from the Philippine capital. The headhunter delivered the ECM-pak from the cargo bay shortly before landing.

  Hawkley spent the whole flight locked in the cockpit with Hubbard. The pilot never got another chance to talk with him.

  He was disappointed, mostly because he’d been going to ask permission to fly the giant seaplane, just for a few minutes; it was something he’d been longing to do, at some level, ever since he’d woken up in his bunk, after they were put to sleep in Nooristan.

  They took a ferry from the island and boarded a tired PAL stretch-747 the following evening.

  Zayid Shah – so Hawkley said – had protected their UCC numbers from whoever was following. In any event they had no trouble at Customs when they arrived at JFK a day later.

  New York seemed gray and bleached and shut-in after the rich smells and temperatures of Darkworld. Newspaper headlines spoke of an escalation of the ‘Water War’ between Iran and Azerbaijan. Brooke Denali had been spotted with a man she was not married to on a balcony of the Cipriani Hotel in Venice.

  Light on choices, they went directly to PC’s apartment from the airport, letting themselves in with PC’s keys. There they slept, on and off, for two or three days as their bodies tried to catch up with the improbable hypotheses in space-time their brains kept insisting was the truth.

  *

  Ela’s flu ran its course – got better, got worse, improved again. The pilot wiped her face, cleaned her body, helped her to and from the bathroom. He sat by the bed, leafing through Shadow magazine, watching while her temperature ran high. When the fever finally broke she was very weak. Her skin was almost translucent, like white candle wax; she would burst into tears without warning or provocation. The weakness went quickly and her skin regained its color in a couple of days, but the cough and depression remained.

  Once, after Rocketman found PC’s jisi yomo stash, along with the gleaming glass-bowled jis’ factory, she smoked jisi for most of a morning, and spent the afternoon sobbing. Except for that one digression, all she wanted to eat was popcorn, over-buttered and with too much salt; all she opted to drink was Zero Cola; all she cared to do was lie in PC’s mammoth bed against a half-dozen propped cushions, her head half covered by a pair of PC’s full-spectrum VR goggles, her finger twitching, during interactive shows, at the minute plastic joystick.

  She refused to discuss what Hawkley said to her, or what she had said to her father.

  She found a bottle of Lebensraum one of PC’s women had left behind, and daubed some every morning behind her ears.

  She almost never sang, anymore.

  The pilot played classics of Shift-shin on PC’s excellent inner-wall system – stuff like Clam Fetish’s ‘Geysir,’ blending the rhythm gushes of volcanic water with raga riffs and Joe Tex bass lines.

  She shook her head irritably when the sound penetrated her face-sucker.

  On his third day in New York the pilot set up the ECM-pak, patching it into cables that led to a dish antenna on the roof. Strapping on the half-sucker he did a quick radar and radio analysis, picking up nothing unusual in the immediate area.

  Then he punched in Wildnet scan.

  At first he thought something was wrong with the software. Under the pulsing opalescent sky of the Web – so far above it was abstract, without meaning, impotent like an idea of God – the dense, matte nighttime of Wildnet space suffused the VR quadrant of his half-sucker.

  Nothing besides remained. No light, no flashing arcs and pulses of information, let alone the busy gridwork of streets and highways of data he used to see on the Wildnets when they were healthy. It reminded him of flicks that had scared him as a boy – the places left, after the holocaust, the nuclear wasteland; empty except for the skeletons of those trapped by a rampage of radiation.

  Controlin
g a sudden limbic-system panic, he joy-sticked forward, and down. The digits of silent SAPs flashed by as he traveled through the dead Usenets, but the digits were extinguished, like neon with the current cut, visible only as shadows.

  The servers themselves were completely dark.

  The feeling of devastation that he’d had before, doing this in Breslau, came back so strongly he could taste it like lye on his tongue. Now the silent servers seemed to him black tombstones arching hugely overhead against the electric night; the systems underneath were cavernous holes diving further into the arcades of the undead, and deeper still, into hell itself, the hell of killed Wildnets, cobwebs of bad info, crypt after crypt of messages lost, corpse after corpse of vampire-sucked phrases – ‘Come in,’ ‘Skeeter, where are you?’ ‘I need,’ ‘I can’t find,’ ‘Do you copy?’ – all dried up and calcified around the horrible Gothic altar of silence.

  Against the black vacuum in the corners of his 3-D vision, he made out one of the dark datalines he’d seen in Breslau, a dead line of silence marked only by the blip of blocked Fedchip from a server pinned just this side of brain dead.

  The blip was thin, infrequent, regular. Carrier beam only.

  Something moved. Down the subtle gray of maintenance, a dark shape swooped onto one of the dead servers and squatted there, silent, still.

  As he passed the next server on the line a second search-engine appeared out of nowhere and settled, like a vulture, or a flying leech, onto the blocked code-matrix.

  Deliberately this time, without panic, the pilot hit control-alt-delete. The half-sucker hissed. The image of desert, of sterile death, condensed to a bright spot of light – was gone.

  This time, the cybernetic postcard, the blasted battlefield of gray that had flashed across his screen in Breslau, did not appear in that millisecond between shutoff and disconnection.

  In a sense, it made no difference. As he pulled off the flying helmet the pilot felt in his bones the chill of ultimate control that had reached out from that blasted Webscape, and shivered. But the effect did not last, as it might have done a week or a month ago.