Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"Your message, it is saying?"

"What do you make of this? It's from my husband."

He examined the paper. "Not English.... A computer cipher. "

A dock robot rolled in with a shipping container on its back. It stacked the box with a powerful wheeze of hydrau- lics. Mr. Suvendra ignored it. "You and husband have a cipher, yes? A code. For hiding the meaning, and showing the message is truly from him."

"We never used anything like that! That's Triad stuff."

"Triad, tong." Suvendra smiled. "Like us, good gemeineschaft .

"Now I'm worried! I've got to call David right now!"

Suvendra shook his head. "The telly say the phones are bloody down. Subversives. "

Laura thought it over. "Look, I can take a taxi across the causeway and call from a phone in Johore. That's Malaysian territory. Maphilindonesian, I mean."

"In the morning," Suvendra said.

"No! David could be hurt. Shot! Dying! Or maybe our baby ..." She felt a racing jolt of guilt and fear. "I'm calling a taxi right now. " She accessed the tourist data on her watchphone.

"Taxis," the phone announced tinnily. "Singapore has over twelve thousand automated taxis, over eight thousand of them air-conditioned. Starting fare is two ecu for the first fifteen hundred meters or part thereof .. .

"Get on with it," Laura grated.

.. hailed in the street or called by telephone: 452-5555..."

"Right." Laura punched numbers. Nothing happened.

"Shit!"

"Have some coffee," Suvendra offered.

"They've killed the phones!" she said, realizing it again, but with a real pang this time. "The Net's down! I can't get on the goddamn Net!"

Suvendra stroked his pencil mustache. "So very important, is it? In your America."

She slapped her own wrist, hard enough to hurt. "David should be talking here right now! What kind of jerkwater place is this?" No access. Suddenly it seemed hard to breathe.

"Look, you must have another line out, right? Fax machine or telex or something."

"No, sorry. Is a bit rough and ready here in Rizome

Singapore. Just lately we move into this wonderful palace."

Suvendra waved his arm. "Very difficult for us." He shrugged.

"You are relaxing, having some coffee, Laura. Could be message is nothing. A trick by the Bank."

Laura smacked her forehead. "I bet that Bank has a line out. Sure. Guarded fiber-optics! Even Vienna can't crack them. And they're right downtown on Bencoolen Street."

"Oh, dear me," said Suvendra. "Very bad idea."

"Look, I know people there. Old Mr. Shaw, a couple of his guards. They were my house guests. They owe me."

"No, no." He put a hand to his mouth.

"They owe me. Stupid bastards, what else are they good for? What are they going to do, shoot me? That'd look great in Parliament, wouldn't it? Hell, I'm not afraid of them-I'm going down there right now." Laura stood up.

"It's very late," Suvendra said timidly.

"They're a bank, aren't they? Banks are open twenty-four hours. "

He looked up at her. "Are they all like you, in Texas?"

Laura frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Can't call taxi," he said practically. "Can't walk in rain.

Catching cold." He stood up. "You are waiting-here, I get my wife." He left.

Laura went outside. Ali and the Party kid were sitting together in the back seat of the rickshaw, under the canopy, holding hands. Didn't mean anything. Different culture. Prob- ably not, anyway .. .

"Hi," she said. "Ummm... I didn't catch your name."

"Thirty-six," the boy said.

"Oh.... Is there a taxi stand near here? I need one."

"A taxi, is it," Thirty-six said blankly.

"For the Yung Soo Chim Bank. On Bencoolen Street?"

Agent Thirty-six hissed a little between his teeth. Ali dug out a cigarette.

"Can I have one of those?" Laura said.

Ali lit it and handed it to her; grinning. She took a puff. It tasted like clove-scented burning garbage. She felt her taste buds dying under a lacquer of cancerous spit. Ali was pleased.

"Okay, madam," said Thirty-six, with a fatalist's shrug.

"I am taking you." He elbowed Ali out of the rickshaw's back seat, then gestured to Laura. "Get on, madam. Start pedaling. "

She pedaled briskly out of the docks and a kilometer up

Trafalgar Street. Then the skies opened up like a water bal- loon, and rain came down in unbelievable pounding torrents.

She stopped and bought a nickel raincoat from a street-corner vending machine.

She turned up Anson Road, pedaling hard, steaming inside her cheap plastic. Rain sheeted from the wheels and steamed off the sidewalks and gushed down the spotless, trashless gutters.

There were a few old colonial-vintage piles by the docklands: white columns, verandahs, and railings. But as they neared downtown the city began to soar. Anson Road became a narrow defile into a mountain range of steel and concrete and ceramic.

It was like downtown Houston. But more like Houston than even Houston had ever had the nerve to become. It was an anthill, a brutal assault against any sane sense of scale.

Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks. Their upper reaches were pocked like waffle irons with triangular bracing. Buttresses, glass-covered superhighways, soared half a mile above sea level.

Story after story rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain.

Here and there the rounded tunnels of Singapore's mag-lev trains; she saw one flit silently above Tanjong Pagar, wheelless and bright, the carriages gleaming in Singapore's Coca-Cola white-and-red.

Agent Thirty-six guided her off the street through the auto- matic doors of a mall. Air conditioning gripped her wet shins.

Soon she was pedaling past rank after silent rank of clothing stores, video places, creepy-looking health centers offering cut-rate blood fractionation.

They drove on for over a mile, through ceramic halls thick with garish, brain-damaging ads. Meandering up and down empty ramps, pausing once to enter an elevator. Thirty-six casually popped the rickshaw onto its rear wheels, telescoped the front, and walked it along behind him like a luggage tote.

The malls were almost deserted; an occasional all-night eatery or coffee bar, its sober, well-groomed customers qu- ietly munching their salads under vivid, spiritless murals of daisies and seagulls. Once they saw some cops, Singapore's. finest, in neatly pressed blue Gurkha shorts, with tangle-guns and yard-long lathi sticks.

She no longer knew where the ground was. It didn't seem to mean much here.

They cruised a walkway. Below them lurked a teenage cycle gang: well-dressed Chinese boys with oiled quiffs, crisp white silk shirts, and gleaming chromed recliner bikes. Thirty- six, who had been lounging in the back with his feet up, sat up and yelled. He shot the boys a series of cryptic gestures, the last unmistakably obscene.

He leaned back again. "Pedal fast," he urged Laura. The boys downstairs hastily split up into hunting packs.

"Let me pedal," Thirty-six said. Laura jumped panting into the back. Thirty-six stood on his pedals and the trike took off like a scalded ape. They took corners on two wheels, his hard, plunging legs rasping in their paper trousers.

They crossed the Singapore River half a mile above the ground, inside a glassed-in archway offering snack stands and rented telescopes. Swollen with tropical rain, the little river surged hopelessly in its neatly managed concrete culvert.

Something about the sight depressed her enormously.

The rain had stopped by the time they reached Bencoolen

Street. Tropical dawn the color of hibiscus was touching the highest steel peaks downtown.