Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Suddenly the hellish racket from the speakers vanished.

Laura's ears rang. With shocking suddenness, she could hear the boy sobbing. Wails of shock and pain bloomed in the sudden silence.

The soccer field was awash with the mob. The bleachers around her were littered with abandoned trash: shoes, hats, splattered dripping drinks. Down at the railing, the dazed and wounded staggered like drunks. Some knelt, sobbing. Others lay sprawled and broken.

Laura sat up slowly onto the bleacher, holding the boy on her lap. He hid his face against her shoulder.

Streaks of television static hissed soundlessly on the giant display board. She breathed hard, trembling. As long as it had lasted, there had been no time, just a maddened, deafen- ing eternity. Madness had streaked through the crowd like a tornado. Now it was gone.

It had lasted maybe forty seconds.

An elderly turbanned Sikh limped past her, his white beard dripping blood.

Down in the soccer field the crowd was milling, slowly.

The police had rallied here and there, clumps of white hel- mets. They were trying to make people sit. Some were doing it, but most were shying away, dumb and reluctant, like cattle.

Laura sucked her mashed knuckles and gazed down in wonder.

It was all for nothing. Sensible, civilized people had boiled out of their seats and trampled each other to death. For no sane reason at all. Now that it was over, they weren't even trying to leave the stadium. Some of them were even return- ing to their seats in the bleachers. Faces drained, legs rubbery- the look of zombies.

At the far end of Laura's bleacher, a .fat woman in a flowered sari was shaking and screaming. She was hitting her husband with her floppy straw hat, over and over again.

There was a touch on Laura's shoulder. Suvendra sat be- side her, her binoculars in her hand. "You are all right?"

"Mama," the little boy begged. He was about six. He had a gold ID bracelet and a T-shirt with a bust of Socrates.

"I hid. Like you did," Laura told Suvendra. She cleared her throat shakily. "That was smart."

"I have seen such troubles before, in Djakarta," Suvendra said.

"What the hell happened?"

Suvendra tapped her binoculars and pointed at the celebrity box. "I have spotted Kim there. He is alive."

"Kim! But I saw him die...."

"You saw a dirty trick," Suvendra said soberly. "What you saw was not possible. Even Kim Swee Lok cannot spit fire and explode." Suvendra winced a little, sourly. "They knew he was scheduled to speak today. They had time to prepare. The terrorists."

Laura knotted her hands. "Oh, Jesus."

Suvendra nodded at the static-laden screen. "The authori- ties have shut it down, now. Because it was sabotaged, yes?

Someone pirated that screen and put on a nightmare. To frighten the city."

"But what about that weird, vile stuff Kim was babbling....

He looked doped!" Laura smoothed the boy's hair absently.

"But that had to be faked, too. It was all a faked tape. Right?

So Kim's all right, really. "

Suvendra touched her binoculars. "No, I saw him. They were carrying him.... I'm afraid the celebrity box was booby- trapped. Kim fell into a trap."

"You mean all that really happened? Kim actually said that? All about dogs and... oh, God, no."

"To drug a man so to play a fool, then make him seem to burn alive-that might seem pleasant-to a voodoo man."

Suvendra stood up, tying the ribbons of her sun hat under her chin.

"But Kim ... he said he wanted peace with Grenada."

"Hurting Kim is a stupid blunder. We could have worked things out sensibly," Suvendra said. "But then, we are not terrorists." She opened her purse and dug out a cigarette.

A woman in a torn satin blouse limped up the aisle, screaming for someone named Lee.

"You can't smoke in public," Laura said blankly. "It's illegal here."

Suvendra smiled. "Rizome must help these poor mad people. I hope you are remembering your first-aid training."

Laura lay in her Rizome camp bed, feeling like shredded confetti. She touched her wrist. Three A.M. Singapore time,

Friday, October 13. The window glowed palely with the bluish light of arc lamps from the wharfs of East Lagoon.

Longshore robots on big lugged tires rolled unerringly through patches of darkness. A skeletal crane dipped into the holds of a Rumanian cargo clipper, the vast iron arm moving with mindless persistence, shuffling giant cargo containers like alphabet blocks.

A television flickered at the foot of Laura's cot, its sound off. Some local newsman, a government-approved flunky like all the newsmen here in Singapore ... like newsmen every- where, when you came right down to it. Reporting from the hospitals .. .

When Laura closed her eyes, she could still see chests

.laboring beneath tom shirts and the gloved, probing fingers of the paramedics. Somehow the screams had been the worst, more unnerving than the sight of blood. That nerve-shredding din of pain, the animal sounds people made when their dig- nity was ripped away .. .

Eleven dead. Only eleven, a miracle. Before this day she'd never known how tough the human body was, that flesh and blood were like rubber, full of unexpected elasticity. Women, little old ladies, had been at the bottom of massive, scram- bling pileups and somehow come out alive. Like the little

Chinese granny with her ribs cracked and her wig knocked off, who had thanked Laura over and over with apologetic nods of her threadbare head, like the riot was all her own fault.

Laura couldn't sleep, still dully tingling with an alchemy of horror and elation. Once again the black water of her night- mares had broken into her life. But she was getting better at it. This time she had actually saved someone. She had jumped out into the. middle of it and rescued someone, a random statistic: little Geoffrey Yong. Little Geoffrey, who lived in

Bukit Timah district and was in first grade and took violin lessons. She'd given him back, alive and whole, to his mother.

"I have a little girl myself," Laura had told her. Mrs.

Yong had given her an unforgettable spirit-lifting look of vast and mystical gratitude. Battlefield gallantry, from sister-soldiers in the Army of Motherhood.

She checked her watchphone again. Just now noon, in

Georgia. She could phone David again, at his hideout at a

Rizome Retreat. It would be great to hear his voice again.

They missed each other terribly, but at least he was there on the phone, to give her the view from the outside world and tell her she was doing well. It made all the difference, took the weight off. She needed desperately to talk about what had happened. To hear the baby's sweet little voice. And to make arrangements to get the hell out of this no-neck town and back where she belonged.

She tapped numbers. Dial tone. Then nothing. Damned thing was broken or something. Cracked in the crush.

She sat up in bed and tried some functions. Still had all her appointment notes, and the list of tourist data they'd given her at customs... . Maybe the signal was bad, too much steel in the walls of this stupid barn. She'd slept in some dumps in her day, but this retro-fitted godown was pushing it, even for

Rizome.

A flicker on the television. Laura glanced down.

Four kids in white karate outfits-no, Greek tunics-had rushed the reporter. They had him down on the pavement outside the hospital, and they were methodically kicking and punching him. Young guys, students maybe. Striped bandan- nas hid their mouths and noses. One of them batted at the camera with a protest sign in hasty, splattered Chinese.

The scene blinked away to an anchor room where a middle- aged Eurasian woman was staring at her monitor aghast.

Laura quickly turned up the sound. The anchor woman jerkily grabbed a sheaf of printout. She began speaking Chinese.