Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

familiar scent under the rust and brine and plastic. A wet, fermenting smell, like tofu.

"Scop!" David said, delighted. "Single-cell protein!"

"Yes," Andrei said. "The Charles Nogues is a food ship."

"Who's this 'Nogues'?" David asked him.

"He was a native hero," Andrei said,, his face solemn.

Carlotta nodded at David. "Charles Nogues threw himself off a cliff."

"What?" David said.. "He was one of those Carib Indians?"

"No, he was a Free Coloured. They came later, they were anti-slavery. But the Redcoat army showed up, and they died fighting." Carlotta paused. "It's an awful fuckin' mess, Gre- nada history. I learned all this from Sticky."

"The crew of this ship are the vanguard of the New Millen- nium Movement," Andrei declared. The four of them fol- lowed his lead, strolling toward the distant, looming high-rise of the ship's super-structure. It was hard not to see it as some peculiar office complex, because the ship itself felt so city- solid underfoot. Traffic passed them on the bicycle paths, men pedaling loaded cargo-rickshaws. "Trusted party cad- res," said blond, Polish Andrei. "Our nomenklatura."

Laura fell a step behind, hefting the baby in her tote, while

David and Andrei walked forward, shoulder to shoulder.

"It's starting to make a certain conceptual sense," David told him.-"This time, if you get chased off your own island like

Nogues and the Caribs, you'll have a nice place to jump to.

Right?" He waved at the ship around them.

Andrei nodded soberly. "Grenada remembers her many invasions. Her people are very brave, and visionaries too, but she's a small country. But the ideas here today are big,

David. Bigger than boundaries."

David looked Andrei up and down, taking his measure.

"What the hell is a guy from Gdansk doing here, anyway?"

"Life is dull in the Socialist Bloc," Andrei told him airily.

"All consumer socialism, no spiritual values. I wanted to be with the action. And the action is South, these days. The

North, our developed world-it is boring. Predictable. This is the edge that cuts."

"So you're not one of those 'mad-doctor' types, huh?"

Andrei was contemptuous. "Such people are useful, only.

We buy them, but they have no true role in the New Millen- nium Movement. They don't understand people's Tech."

Laura could hear the capital letters in his emphasis. She didn't like the way this was going at all.

She spoke up. "Sounds very nice. How do you square that with dope factories and data piracy?"

"All information should be free," Andrei told her, slowing his walk. "As for drugs-" He reached into a side pocket in his jeans. He produced a flat roll of shiny paper and handed it to her.

Laura looked it over. Little peel-off rectangles of sticky- backed paper. It looked like a blank roll of address labels.

"So?"

"You paste them on," Andrei said patiently. "The glue has an agent, which carries the drug through the skin. The drug came from a wetware lab, it is synthetic THC, the active part of marijuana. Your little roll of paper is the same, you see, as many kilograms of hashish. It is worth about twenty ecu. Very little." He paused. "Not so thrilling, so romantic, eh? Not so much to get excited about."

"Christ," Laura said. She tried to hand it back.

"Please keep it, it means very little."

Carlotta spoke up. "She can't hold this, Andrei. Come on, they're online and the bosses are lookin'." She stuffed the roll of paper into her purse, grinning at Laura. "You know,

Laura, if you'd point those glasses over there to starboard, I can slap a little of this crystal on the back of your neck, and nobody in Atlanta will ever know. You can rush like Niagara on this stuff. Crystal THC, girl! The Goddess was cruisin'

when She invented that one."

"Those are mind-altering drugs," Laura protested. She sounded stuffy and virtuous, even to herself. Andrei smiled indulgently, and Carlotta laughed aloud. "They're danger- ous," Laura said.

"Maybe you think it will jump off the paper and bite you," Andrei said. He waved politely at a passing Rastaman.

"You know what I mean," Laura said.

"Oh, yes"-Andrei yawned-"you never use drugs your- self, but what about the effect on people who are stupider and weaker than you, eh? You are patronizing other people.

Invading their freedoms."

They walked past a huge electric anchor winch, and a giant pump assembly, with two-story painted tanks in a jungle of pipes. Rastas with hard hats and clipboards paced the cat- walks over the pipes.

"You're not being fair," David said. "Drugs can trap people. "

"Maybe," Andrei said. "If they have nothing better in their lives. But look at the crew on this ship. Do they seem like drugged wreckage to you? If America suffers from drugs, perhaps you should ask what America is lacking."

["What an asshole,"] Eric King commented suddenly.

They ignored him.

Andrei led them up three flights of perforated iron stairs, bracketed to the portholed superstructure of the Charles Nogues.

There was an intermittent flow of locals up and down the stairs, with chatting crowds on the landings. Everyone wore the same pocketed jeans and the standard-issue cotton blouses.

But a chosen few had plastic shirtpocket protectors, with pens. Two pens, or three pens, or even four. One guy, a beer-bellied Rasta with a frown and bald spot, had half a dozen gold-plated fibertips. He was followed by a crowd of flunkies. "Whoopee, real Socialism," Laura muttered at

Carlotta.

"I can take the baby if you want." Carlotta said, not hearing her. "You must be getting tired."

Laura hesitated. "Okay." Carlotta smiled as Laura handed her the tote. She slung its strap over her shoulder. "Hello,

Loretta," she cooed, poking at the baby. Loretta looked up at her doubtfully and decided to let it pass.

They stepped through a hatch door, with rounded corners and a rubber seal, into the fluorescent lights of a hall. Lots of old scratched teak, scuffed linoleum. The walls were hung with stuff-"People's Art," Laura guessed, lots of child- bright tropical reds and golds and greens, dreadlocked men and women reaching toward a slogan-strewn blue sky... .

"This is the bridge," Andrei announced. It looked like a television studio, dozens of monitor screens, assorted cryptic banks of knobs and switches, a navigator's table with elbowed lamps and cradled telephones. Through a glassed-in wall above the monitors, the deck of the ship stretched out like a twenty-four-lane highway. There were little patches of ocean, way, way down there, looking too distant to matter much. Glancing through the windows, Laura saw that there were a pair of big cargo barges on the supertanker's port side.

They'd been completely hidden before, by the sheer rising bulk of the ship. The barges pumped their loads aboard through massive ribbed pipelines. There was a kind of uneasy nastiness to the sight, vaguely obscene, like the parasitic sexuality of certain deep-sea fish.

"Don't you wanna look?" Carlotta asked her, swinging the baby back and forth at her hip. Andrei and David were already deeply engrossed, examining gauges and talking a mile a minute. Really absorbing topics, too, like protein fractionation and slipstream turbulence. A ship's officer was helping explain, one of the bigwigs with multiple pens. He looked weird: velvety black skin and straight blond flaxen hair. "This is more David's sort of thing," Laura said.

"Well, could you go offline for a second, then?"

"Huh?" Laura paused. "Anything you want to tell me, you ought to be able to tell Atlanta."

"You gotta be kidding," Carlotta said, rolling her eyes.

"What's the deal, Laura? We talked private all the time at the

Lodge, and nobody bothered us then."