Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Moscow for dollars, back when there were dollars. Big fleas had little fleas, big black markets had little black markets.

Funny!

Laura felt pleased, sure she was on to something. Tonight she'd have to write Debra Emerson in Atlanta, on an encrypted line, and tell her: yeah, Debra, here's a place to stick a crowbar. Debra'd know how, too: it was just like bad old

CIA work before the Abolition... . What did they used to call it? Destabilization.

"It's not like the Warsaw Pact, _before openness," contin- ued Andrei, shaking his handsome blond head. "Our island is more like little OPEC country-Kuwait, Abu Dhabi... . Too much easy money eats the social values, makes life like

Disneyland, all fat Cadillacs and the cartoon mouses ... empty, meaningless. "

Blaize smiled a little, his eyes half closed, like a dreadlocked

Buddha. "Without Movement discipline," he rumbled smoothly,

"our money would flow back, like water downhill... from the Third World periphery, down to the centers of the Net.

Your `free market' cheats us; it's a Babylon slave market in truth! Babylon would drain away our best people, too ... they would go to where the phones already work, where the streets are already paved. They want the infrastructure, where the

Net is woven thickest, and it's easiest to prosper. It is a vicious cycle, making Third World sufferation."

"But today the adventure is here!" Andrei broke in, leaning forward. "No more frontiers in your America, David, my friend! Today it's all lawyers and bureaucrats and `social impact statements'.... "

Andrei sneered and slapped his fork on the tabletop. "Huge prison walls of paperwork to crush the life and hope from modern pioneers! Just as ugly, just such a crime, as the old

Berlin Wall, David. Only more clever, with better public relations." He glanced at Laura, sidelong. "Scientists and engineers, and architects, too, yes-we brothers, David, who do the world's true work-where is our freedom? Where, eh?"

Andrei paused, tossing his head to flick back a loose wing of blond hair. Suddenly he had the dramatic look of an orator on a roll, a man drawing inspiration from deep wells of sincerity. "We have no freedom! We cannot follow our dreams, our visions. Governments and corporations break us to their harness! For them, we make only colored toothpaste, softer toilet paper, bigger TVs to stupefy the masses!" He chopped air with his hands. "It's an old man's world today, with old man's values! With soft, cozy padding on all the sharp corners, with ambulances always standing by. Life is more than this, David. Life has to be more than this!"

The ship's officers had stopped to listen. As Andrei paused, they nodded among themselves. "I-rey, mon, star righ- teous Laura watched them trade sturdy looks of macho comradeship. The air felt syrup-thick with their ship crew's gemeineschaft, reinforced by the Party line. It felt familiar to

Laura, like the good community feeling at a Rizome meeting, but stronger, less rational. Militant-and scary, because it felt so good. It tempted her.

She sat quietly, trying to relax, to see through their eyes and feel and understand. Andrei blazed on, hitting his stride now, preaching about the Genuine Needs of the People, the social role of the Committed Technician. It was a mishmash:

Food, and Liberty, and Meaningful Work. And the New Man and New Woman, with their hearts with the people, but their eyes on the stars.... Laura watched the crew. What must they be feeling? Young, most of them; the committed Move- ment elite, taken from those sleepy little island towns into a place like this. She imagined them running up and down the deck stairs of their strange steel world, hot and fervid, like hopped-up lab rats. Sealed in a bottle and drifting away from the Net's laws and rules and standards.

Yeah. So many changes, so many shocks and novelties; they broke people up inside. Dazzled by potential, they longed to throw out the rules and limits, all the checks and balances- all discredited now, all lies of the old order. Sure, Laura thought. This was why Grenada's cadres could chop genes like confetti, rip off data for their Big Brother dossiers, and never think twice. When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.

Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets. Grenada could be 1920s

Russia, 1940s Germany, 1980s Iran. All it would take was a war.

Of course it wouldn't be a big war, not nowadays. But even a little terror war could turn things septic in a little place like Grenada. Just enough killing to raise the level of hysteria and make every dissident a traitor. A little war, she thought, like the one beginning to seethe already... .

Andrei stopped. David smiled at him uneasily. "I can see you've given this speech before."

"You are skeptical about talk," Andrei said, throwing down his napkin. "That's only wise. But we can show you the facts and the practice." He paused. "Unless you want to wait for dessert."

David looked at Laura and Carlotta. "Let's go," Laura said. Sweetened scop was nothing to linger for.

They nodded at the crew, thanked the captain politely, left the table. They exited the dining room by another hallway and stopped by a pair of elevators. Andrei punched a button and they stepped in; the doors slid shut behind them.

Static roared in Laura's head. "Jesus Christ!" David said, clutching his earpiece. "We just went offline!"

Andrei glanced once, over his shoulder, skeptically. "Re- lax, yes? It's only a moment. We can't wire everything."

"Oh," David said. He glanced at Laura. Laura stood clutching the tote as the elevator descended. Yeah, they'd lost the armor of television, and here they stood helpless: Andrei and Carlotta could jump them . jab them with knockout needles.... They'd wake up somewhere strapped to tables with dope-crazed voodoo doctors sewing little poisoned time bombs into their brains.... ;

Andrei and Carlotta stood flat-footed, with the patient, bovine look of people in elevators. Nothing whatever happened.

The doors slid open. Laura and David rushed out into the corridor, clutching their headsets. Long, long seconds of crackling static. Then a quick staccato whine of datapulse.

Finally, high-pitched anxious shouting in Spanish.

"We're fine, fine, just a little break," Laura told Mrs.

Rodriguez. David reassured her at length, in Spanish. Laura missed the words, but not the distant tone of voice: frantic little-old-lady fear, sounding weak and tremulous. Of course, good old Mrs. Rodriguez, she was only worried for them; but despite herself, Laura felt annoyed. She adjusted her glasses and straightened self-consciously.

Andrei was waiting for them, suffering fools gladly, hold- ing a side door. Beyond it was a scrubbing room, with shower stalls and stainless-steel sinks under harsh blue light, and air that smelled of soap and ozone. Andrei yanked open a rubber-sealed locker. Its shelves were stacked with fresh- pressed scrub garments in surgical green: tunics, drawstring pants, hairnets and surgical masks, even little crinkly, tie-on galoshes.

"Mrs. Rodriguez," David said, excited. "Looks like we need a Rizome bio-tech online."

Andrei stretched over a sink, catching an automatic drip feed of pink disinfectant. He lathered up vigorously. Beside him, Carlotta caught water in a sterile paper cup. Laura saw her palm a red Romance pill from her purse. She knocked it back with the ease of long practice.

From within her tote, Loretta wrinkled up her little eyes.

She didn't like the scrub room's light, or maybe it was the smell. She whimpered rhythmically, then began screaming.