Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"Mrs. Rodriguez," David said calmly. "We need an oceaneering tech online. Tell Atlanta."

["Okay David, right away. "]

Laura counted thirty major installations standing offshore.

They were full of people. Most of them were old jackup oil-drilling rigs, their fretted legs standing twenty stories tall, their five-story bases towering high above the water. Martian giants, their knees surrounded by loading docks and small moored barges. Grenada's tropic sunlight gleamed fitfully from aluminum sleeping cabins the size and shape of mobile homes, seeming as small as toys aboard their rigs.

A pair of round, massive OTECS chugged placidly, suck- ing hot seawater to power their ammonia boilers. Octopus nests of floating cables led from the power stations to rigs piled high with green-and-yellow tangles of hydraulics.

They pulled off the highway. Carlotta pointed: "That's where, they jumped!" The cliffs of Point Sauteur were only forty feet high, but the rocks below them looked nasty enough.

They would have looked better with raging romantic break- ers, but the jetties and wave baffles had turned this stretch of sea into a mud-colored simmering soup. "On a clear day you can see Carriacou from the cliffs," Carlotta said. "Lot of amazing stuff out on that little island-it's part of Grenada,

She parked the three-wheeler on a strip of white gravel beside a drydock. Inside the drydock, blue-white arc welders spat brilliance. They left the car.

A sea breeze crept onshore, stinking of ammonia and urea.

Carlotta threw her arms back and inhaled hugely. "Fertilizer plants," Carlotta said. "Like the old days on the Gulf Coast, huh?"

"My granddad used to work in those," David said. "The old refinery complexes... you remember those, Carlotta?"

"Remember 'em?" She laughed. "These are them, I reckon.

They got all this dead tech dirt cheap-bought it, abandoned in place." She slipped on her earphones and listened. "Andrei's waiting... he can explain for y'all. C'mon."

They walked under the shadows of towering cranes, up the limestone steps of a seawall, down to the waterfront. A

deeply tanned blond man sat on the stone dock, drinking coffee with a pair of Grenadian longshoremen. All three men wore loose cotton blouses, multipocketed jeans, hard hats, and steel-toed deck shoes.

"At last, here they are," said the blond man, rising.

"Hello, Carlotta. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Webster. And this must be your little baby. What a cute little chicken." He touched the baby's nose with a grease-stained forefinger. The baby gurgled at him and gave him her best toothless smile.

"My name is Andrei Tarkovsky," the technician said. "I was from Poland." He looked at his dirty hands apologeti- cally. "Forgive me for not shaking."

"S'okay," David said.

"They have asked me to show you some of what we do here." He waved at the end of the pier. "I have a boat."

The boat was a twelve-foot swamp runner with a blunt prow and a water jet outboard. Andrei handed them life jackets, including a small one for the baby. They belted up.

Loretta, amazingly, took it cheerfully. They climbed down a short ladder onto the boat.

David sat in the stern. Laura and the baby took the bow, facing backward, sitting on a padded thwart. Carlotta sprawled in the bottom. Andrei shoved off and thumbed the engine on.

They scudded north over the slimy water.

David turned to Andrei and said something about catalytic cracking units. At that moment a new voice came online.

["Hello Rizome-Grenada, this is Eric King in San Diego... .

Could you give me another look at that distillation unit.... No, you, Laura, look at the big yellow thing-"]

"I'll take it," Laura shouted to David, putting her hand over her ear. "Eric, where is it you want me to look?"

["To your left-yeah-jeez, I haven't seen one like that in twenty years.... Could you give me just a straight, slow scan from right to left... . Yeah, that's great." ] He fell silent as Laura panned across the horizon.

Andrei and David were already arguing. "Yes, but you pay for feedstocks," Andrei told David passionately. "Here we have power from ocean thermals"-he waved at a chugging

OTEC-"which is free. Ammonia is NH3. Nitrogen from the air, which is free. Hydrogen from the seawater, which is free.

All it costs is capital investment."

["Yeah, and maintenance,"] Eric King said sourly. "Yeah, and maintenance," Laura said loudly.

"Is not a problem, with the modern polymers," Andrei said smoothly. "Inert resins ... we paint them on ... reduce corrosion almost to nothing. You must be familiar with these."

"Expensive," David said.

"Not for us," Andrei said. "We manufacture them."

He piloted them below a jackleg rig. When they crossed the sharp demarcation of its shadow, Andrei cut the engine.

They drifted on; the rig's flat, two-acre flooring, riddled with baroque plumbing, rose twenty feet above the shadowed wa- ter. At a sea-level floating dock, a dreadlocked longshoreman looked them over coolly, his face, framed in headphones.

Andrei guided them to one of the rig's four legs. Laura could see the thick painted sheen of polymer on the great load-bearing pipes and struts. There were no barnacles at the waterline. No seaweed, no slime. Nothing grew on this struc- ture. It was slick as ice.

David turned to Andrei, waving his hands animately. Car- lotta slouched in the bottom of the boat and dangled her feet over the side, smiling up at the bottom of the rig.

["I wanted to mention that my brother, Michael King, stayed in your Lodge last year,"] King said online. ["He spoke; really highly of it. "]

"Thanks, that's nice to know," Laura said into the air.

David was talking to Andrei, something about copper poison- ing and embedded biocides. He ignored King, turning down the volume on his earpiece.

["I've been following this Grenadian affair. Under the awful circumstances, you've been doing well."]

"We appreciate that support and solidarity, Eric."

["My wife agrees with me on this-though she thinks the .

Committee could have managed better.... You're support- ing the Indonesian, right? Suvendra?"]

Laura paused. She hadn't thought of the Committee elec- tions in a while. Emily supported Suvendra. "Yeah, that's right."

["What about Pereira?"]

"I like Pereira, but I'm not sure he has the stuff," Laura said. Carlotta grinned to see her, like an idiot, muttering into midair at an unseen presence. Schizoid. Laura frowned. Too much input at once. With her eyes and ears wired on separate realities, her brain felt divided on invisible seams, everything going slightly waxy and unreal. She was getting Net-burned.

["Okay, I know Pereira blew it in Brasilia, but he's honest.

What about Mr. Suvendra and this Islamic Bank business? That doesn't bother you?"]

David, still rapt in conversation with the émigré Pole, stopped suddenly and put his hand to his ear. "Islamic Bank business," Laura thought, with a little cold qualm. Of course.

Someone from Rizome was negotiating with the Singapore data pirates. And of course, it would be Suvendra. It fell neatly into place: Ms. Emerson, and Suvendra, and Emily

Donato. The Rizome old girls' network in action.

"Um ... Eric," David said aloud. "This is not a private line."

["Oh,"] King said in a small, now-I've-done-it voice.

"We'd be glad to have your input, if you could write it up and send e-mail. Atlanta can encrypt it for you."

["Yeah, sure,"] King said. ["Stupid of me... my apologies."] Laura felt sorry for him. She was glad David had gotten him off her back, but she didn't like the way it sounded. The guy was being frank and up-front, in very

Rizome-correct fashion, and here they were telling him to mind his manners because they were on spook business. How would it look?