Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"Damn!" Laura switched channels.

Press conference. Chinese guy in medical whites. He had that weird, repulsive look common to some older Singaporeans

-the richer ones. A tightened vampire face, sleek, ageless skin. Part hair dye, part face-lift, part monkey glands maybe, or weekly blood changes tapped how teenage Third Worlders ...

...ull function, yes," Dr. Vampire said. "Today, many people with Tourette's Syndrome can live quite normal lives."

Mumble mumble mumble from the floor. This thing looked taped. Laura wasn't sure why. Somehow it lacked that fresh feeling.

"After the attack, Miss Ting held the prime minister's hands," said Dr. Vamp. "Because of this, the transfer agent contaminated her fingers also. Of course, the drug dosage was much lower than that received by the prime minister. We still have Miss Ting under observation. But the convulsions and so forth were, ah, never in question in her case."

Laura felt a surge of shock and loathing. That poor little actress. They got Kim through something he touched, and she held his hands. Holding the hands of her country's leader while he was foaming and screaming like some rabid baboon.

Oh, Christ. What did Miss Ting think when she realized she was getting it, too? Laura missed the next question. Mumble mumble Grenada mumble.

Frown, dismissive wave. "The use of biomedicine for political terrorism is ... horrifying. It violates every conceiv- able ethical code."

"You fucking hypocrite!" Laura shouted at the box.

Light rap at her door. Laura started, then tugged her cotton

T-shirt lower, over her underwear. "Come in?"

Suvendra's husband peeked around the door, a natty little man wearing a hair net and paper pajamas. "I am hearing you awake," he said politely. His accent was even less compre- hensible than Suvendra's. "There is a messenger at loading gate. He ask for you!"

"Oh. Okay. Be right down." He left and Laura jumped into her jeans. Grenadian cadre jeans-now that she'd broken them in, she liked them. She kicked on cheap foam sandals she'd bought locally for the price of a pack of gum.

Out the room, up the hall, down the catwalk stairs, under the arching girders and the dusty arc-lit glass. Walls lined with domino stacks of container shipping, socketed steel boxes the size of mobile homes. A dock robot sprawled wheelless on a hydraulic lift. Smell of rice and grease and coffee beans and rubber.

Outside the godown, at the truck dock, one of Suvendra's

Rizome crew was talking with the messenger. They spotted her, and there was a quick flare of red as the Rizome kid stomped out a cigarette.

The messenger's sandaled feet were propped on the handle- bars of his rickshaw, an elegant, springy tricycle framed in lacquered bamboo and piano wire.

The boy leapt from his seat with easy, balletic grace. He wore a white muscle shirt and cheap paper slacks. He looked about seventeen, a Malay kid with brown shoe-button eyes and arms like a gymnast. "Good evening, madam."

"Hi," Laura said. They shook hands, and he stuck his knuckle into her palm. A secret-society shake.

"He is `lazy' and 'stupid,' " the Rizome kid hinted. Like the rest of Suvendra's local crew, the Rizome kid was not

Singaporean, but a Maphilindonesian, from Djakarta. His name was Ali.

"Huh?" Laura said.

"I am `unfit for conventional employment,' " the messen- ger said, meaningfully.

"Oh. Right," Laura said, realizing. The kid was from the local opposition. The Anti-Labour Party.

Suvendra had scraped up a little solidarity with the leader of the Anti-Labourites. His name was Razak. Like Suvendra,

Razak was a Malay, a minority group in a city 80 percent

Chinese. He had managed to cobble together a fragile local mandate: part ethnic, part classbased, but mostly pure lunatic fringe.

Razak's political philosophy was bizarre, but he had held out stubbornly against the assaults of Kim's ruling party.

Therefore, he was now in a position to raise embarrassing questions on the floor of Parliament. His interests partly coincided with Rizome's, so they were allies.

And the Anti-Labourites made full use of the alliance, too.

Ragged bands of them hung out at the Rizome godown, cadg- ing handouts, using the phones and bathroom, running off peculiar handbills on the company Xerox. In the mornings they grouped together in the city parks, eating protein paste and practicing martial arts in their torn paper pants. People gathered to laugh at them.

Laura gave the kid her best conspiratorial glance. "Thanks for coming so late. I appreciate your, uh, dedication."

The boy shrugged "No problem, madam. I am the ob- server for your civil rights."

Laura glanced at Ali. "What?"

"He is staying this place all night," Ali said. "He is observing for our civil rights."

"Oh. Thank you," Laura said vaguely. It seemed as good an excuse to loiter as any. "We could send down some food or something."

"I eat only scop," the boy said. He plucked a crumpled envelope from a hidden slot under his rickshaw seat. Parliamentary stationery.: THE HONORABLE DR. ROBERT RAZAK, M.P. (Anson).

"It's from Bob," Laura told them, hoping to retrieve some lost prestige. She opened it.

A hasty scrawl of red ink above a printout.

Despite our well-founded ideological opposition we of the Anti-Labour Party do of course maintain files in the

Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank, and this message arrived at 2150 hrs local time, tagged for you. If reply is necessary, do not use local phone system. Wishing you the best of luck in these difficult times. Message fol-

IOWS: YDOOL EQKOF UHFNH HEBSG HNDGH QNOQP LUDOO.

JKEIL KIFUL FKEIP POLKS DOLFU JENHF HFGSE! IHFUE KYFEN

KUBES KUVNE KNESE NHWQQ KVNEI? JEUNF HFENA OBGHE

BHSIF WHIBE. QHIRS QIFES BEHSE IPHES HBESA HFIEW HBEIA!

DAVID

"It's from David," Laura blurted. "My husband."

"Husband," the Party kid mused. He seemed sorry to hear that she had one.

"Why this? Why didn't he just phone me?" Laura said.

"The phones being out of order," the boy said. "Full of spooks. "

"Spooks?" Laura said. "You mean spies?"

The boy muttered something in Malay. "He means demons," Ali translated. "Evil spirits."

"You kidding?" Laura said.

"It tell me they are evil spirits, said the boy calmly.

" `Uttering terrorist threats intended to sow panic and dissen- sion.' A felony under Article 15, Section 3." He frowned.

"But only in English, madam! It did not use Malay language although use of Malay is officially mandated in Singapore

Constitution. "

"What did the demon say?" Laura demanded.

" `The enemies of the righteous to burn with brimstone fire,' " the boy quoted. " 'Jah Whirlwind to smite the oppressor.' Much else in similar bloody vein. It call me by name." He shrugged. "My mother cried."

"His mother thinks he should get a job," Ali confided.

"The future belong to the stupid and lazy," the boy de- clared. He doubled up his legs and perched expertly on the bamboo strut of his rickshaw.

Ali rubbed his chin. "Chinese and Tamil languages-were these also neglected?"

A gust of wind blew in from offshore. Laura rubbed her arms. She wondered if she should tip the kid. No, she remembered-the A-L.P. had some kind of strange phobia against touching money. "I'm going back inside."

The boy examined the sky. "Sumatra monsoon coming, madam." He popped hinges and pulled up the accordioned canopy of his rickshaw. The white nylon was painted in red, black, and yellow: a Laughing Buddha, crowned with thorns.

Inside the godown, Mr. Suvendra squatted on a quilted gray loading mat under the watery light of the geodesics. He had a television and a pot of coffee. Laura joined him, sitting cross-legged. "I am not like this graveyard shift," he said.