Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Her yells echoed harshly from the walls and scared her into new convulsions of effort. "Oh, Loretta," Laura chided her.

"And you've been so good lately, too." She kicked down the tote's wire rocker stand and rocked it on the floor; but Loretta only turned tomato-red and flung her chubby arms wildly.

Laura checked her diaper and sighed. "Can I change her in here, Andrei?"

Andrei was rinsing his neck; he pointed with his elbow at a disposal chute. Laura dug in the back of the tote and unrolled the changing pad from its tube. "That's cute," Carlotta said, crowding up and peering over her shoulder. "Like a window shade. "

"Yeah," Laura said. "See, you press this button on the side, and little bubble-cell padding pops up." She spread the pad over a laminated counter and set Loretta on it. The baby wailed in existential terror.

Her little kicking rump was caked with shit. By this time,

Laura had learned to look at it without really seeing it. She cleaned it deftly with an oiled napkin, not saying anything.

Carlotta was squeamish and looked away, at the tote.

"Wow! This thing is really intricate! Hey look, these flaps pop out and you can make it into a baby bath... "

"Hand me the powder, Carlotta." Laura puffed dry spray on the baby's rump and sealed her in a new diaper. Loretta howled like a lost soul.

David came up. "You get scrubbed, I'll take her." Loretta had one look at her father's surgical mask and screamed in anguish. "For heaven's sake," David said.

["You shouldn't take your baby into a bio-hazard zone,"]

said a new voice online.

"You don't think so?" David shouted. "She won't like wearing the mask, that's for sure."

Carlotta looked up. "I could take her," she said meekly.

["Don't trust her,"] online said at once.

"We can't let the baby out of our sight," David told

Carlotta. "You understand."

"Well," Carlotta said practically, "I could wear Laura's headset. And that way, Atlanta could watch everything I did.

And meanwhile Laura would be safe with you."

Laura hesitated. "My earplug's custom-made."

"It's flexible, I. could wear it for a while. C'mon, I can do it, I'd like to."

"What do you think, online?" David said.

["It's me, Millie Syers, from Raleigh,"] online told them.

["You remember. John and I and our boys were in your

Lodge, last May."]

"Oh, hello," Laura said. "How are you, Professor Syers?"

["Well, I got over my sunburn."] Millie Syers laughed.

["And please don't call me Professor; it's very non-R. Any- way, if you want my advice, I wouldn't leave any baby of mine with some data pirate dressed like a hooker."]

"She is a hooker," David said. Carlotta smiled.

["Well! I guess that explains it. Must not see many babies in her line of work.... Hmmm, if she wore Laura's rig, I suppose I could watch what she did, and if she tries anything

I could scream. But what's to keep her from dropping the glasses and running off with the baby?"]

"We're in the middle of a supertanker, Millie," David said. "We got about three thousand Grenadians all around us."

Andrei looked up from tying his galoshes. "Five thousand,

David," he said, over the baby's piercing sobs. "Are you not sure you are both carrying this a bit far? All these little quibbles of security?"

"I promise she'll be all right," Carlotta said. She raised her right hand, with the center finger bent down into the palm. "I swear it by the Goddess."

["Good heavens, she's one of"] said Millie Syers, but

Laura lost the rest as she stripped off her rig. It felt glorious to have it out of her head. She felt free and clean for the first time in ages; a weird feeling, with the sudden strange urge to jump in a shower stall and soap down.

She locked eyes with Carlotta. "All right, Carlotta. I'm trusting you, with what I love best in the world. You under- stand that, don't you? I don't have to say anything more."

Carlotta nodded soberly, then shook her head.

Laura scrubbed and got quickly into the gear. The baby's howling was driving them out of the room.

Andrei ushered them to another elevator, at the back of the scrub room. She looked back one last time at the door and saw Carlotta walking back and forth with the baby, singing.

Andrei stepped in after them, turned his back, and pushed the button. "We're losing the signal again," David warned.

The steel doors slid shut.

They descended slowly. Suddenly Laura was shocked to feel David tenderly pat her ass. She jumped and stared at him.

"Hey, babe," he murmured. "We're offline. Wow."

He was starved for privacy.

And here they had almost thirty seconds of it. As long as

Andrei didn't turn and look. She glanced at David in frustration, wanting to tell him what? To reassure him that it wasn't so bad.

And that she felt it, too. And that they could tough it out together, but he'd better behave himself. And yeah, that it was a funny thing to do, and she was sorry she was jumpy.

But absolutely none of it could get across to him. With the surgical mask and the gold-etched glasses, David's face had turned totally alien. No human contact.

The doors opened; there was a sudden rush of air and their ears popped. They turned left into another hall. "It's okay,

Millie," David said distractedly. "We're fine, leave Carlotta alone... .

He kept mumbling from behind his mask, shaking his head and talking into the air. Like a madman. It was odd how peculiar it looked when you weren't doing it yourself. This hall looked peculiar, too: strangely funky and makeshift, the ceiling tilted, the walls out of true. It was cardboard, that was it-brown cardboard and thin wire mesh, but all of it lacquered over with a thick, steel-hard ooze of translucent plastic. The lights overhead were wired with extension cord, cheap old household extension cord, all stapled to the ceiling and sealed under thick lacquered gunk. It was all stapled, there wasn't a nail in it anywhere. Laura touched the wall, wondering. It was quality plastic, slick and hard as porcelain, and she knew from the feel of it that a strong man couldn't dent it with an axe. But there was so much of it-and it cost so much to make! Yeah, but maybe not so much-if you didn't pay insurance, or worker's comp, and never shut down for safety inspec- tions, and didn't build failsafes and crashproof control sys- tems and log every modification in triplicate. Sure; even nuclear power was cheap if you played fast and loose.

But bio-safety rules were ten times as strict, or supposed to be. Maybe plutonium was bad, but at least it couldn't jump out of a tank and grow by itself.

"This hall is made of cardboard! David said.

"No, it's thermal epoxy over cardboard," Andrei told him.

"You see that plug? Live steam. We can boil this entire hall at any moment. Not that we would need to, of course."

At the hall's end, they stopped by a tall sealed hatchway. It had the international symbol of bio-hazard: the black-and- yellow, triple-horned circle. Good graphic design, Laura thought as Andrei worked the hatch wheel; as frightening in its ele- gant way as a skull and crossbones.

They stepped through.

They emerged on a landing of lacquered bamboo. It stood forty feet in the air, overlooking a steel cavern the size of an aircraft hangar. They'd reached a section of the supertanker's hold; its floor-the steel hull-was gently curved. And lit- tered with surreal machinery, like the careless toys of some giant ten-year-old with a taste for chemistry sets.

The cardboard corridor, and their bamboo landing, and its sloping, spidery catwalks, were all bolted to a monster bulk- head at their backs. The hangar's far bulkhead rose in the distance, a great gray wall of girder-stiffened steel-this one spread with a giant polychrome mural. A mural of men and women in berets and fatigue shirts, marching under banners, their pie-cut painted eyes as big as basketballs, fixed in midair... their brown arms rounded and monolithic, gleam- ing like wax in a strange underwater glare.