Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Laura's crowd emitted an amazing, heartfelt sigh, as if every person in it had spotted a long-lost lover. Suddenly everyone was running, arms outstretched. The two crowds hit, and merged, and mingled. The hair rose on Laura's neck.

There was something loose in this crowd, something purely magical-a mystic social electricity. She could feel it in her bones, some kind of glad triumphant opposite to the ugly crowd-madness she'd seen at the stadium. People fell, but they were helping each other up and embracing each other... .

She lost Singh. Suddenly she was alone in the crowd, tripping along in the middle of a long fractal swirl of it. She glanced down the street. A block away, another subcrowd, and a cluster of red-and-white police cars.

Her heart leapt. She broke from the crowd and ran toward them.

The cops were surrounded. They were embedded in the crowd, like ham in aspic. People-everyone, anyone-had simply clotted around the police, immobilizing them. The prowl cars' doors were open and the cops were trying to reason with them, without success.

Laura edged up through the crowd. Everyone was shout- ing, and their hands were full-not with weapons, but with all kinds of strange stuff: bags of bread rolls, transistor ra- dios, even a handful of marigolds snatched from some windowpot. They were thrusting them at the police, begging them to take them. A middle-aged Chinese matron was shout- ing passionately at a police captain. "You are our brothers!

We are all Singaporeans. Singaporeans do not kill each other!"

The police captain couldn't meet the woman's eyes. He sat on the edge of the driver's seat, tight-lipped, in an ecstasy of humiliation. There were three other cops in his car, decked out in full riot gear: helmets, vests, tangle-rifles. They could have flattened the crowd in a few instants, but they looked stunned, nonplussed.

A man in a silk business suit thrust his arm through the open backseat window. "Take my watch, officer! As a sou- venir! Please-this is a great day...." The cop shook his head, with a gentle, stunned look. Next to him, his fellow cop munched a rice cake.

Laura tapped the captain's shoulder. He looked up and recognized her. His eyes rolled a little in their sockets, as if she was all that was needed to make his experience complete.

"What do you want?"

Laura told him, discreetly. "Arrest you here?" the captain replied. "In front of these people?"

"I can get you away," Laura told him. She clambered onto the hood of the prowl car, stood up, and raised both arms.

"Everyone listen! You know me-I'm Laura Webster. Please let us through! We have very important business! Yes, that's right, move back away from the hood, ladies and gentlemen....

Thank you very much, you're such good people, I'm so grateful..:."

She sat on the hood, propping her feet on the front bumper.

The car crept forward and the crowd peeled away to either side, respectfully. Many of them obviously failed to recog- nize her. But they reacted instinctively to the totem symbol of a foreign woman in a green sari on the hood of a police car.

Laura stretched out her arms and made vague swimming motions. It worked. The crowd moved faster.

They reached the edge of the crowd. Laura wedged herself in the front seat, between the captain and a lieutenant. "Thank

God," she said.

"Mrs. Webster," the police captain said. His badge said his name was Hsiu. "You are under arrest for obstruction of justice and incitement to riot."

"Okay," Laura breathed. "Do you know what happened to the rest of my Rizome people?"

"They are also arrested. The helicopters got them."

Laura nodded eagerly, then stopped. "Uhmm... they're not in Changi, are they?"

"There's nothing wrong with Changi!" the cop said, net- tled. "Don't listen to globalist lies."

They were tooling slowly up Pickering Street, crammed with beauty salons and cosmetic-surgery joints. The side- walks were crowded with grinning, larking curfew breakers, but they hadn't yet thought to block the street. "You foreign- ers," the captain said slowly. "You cheated us. Singapore could have built a new world. But you poisoned our leader, and you robbed us. This is it. Enough. All finish."

"Grenada poisoned Kim."

Captain Hsiu shook his head. "I don't believe in Grenada."

"But it's your own people who are doing this," Laura told him. "At least you weren't invaded."

The cop gave her a salt-in-the-wounds look. "We are invaded. Didn't you know?"

She was stunned. "What? Vienna came in?"

"No," said a cop in the back with pessimistic relish. "It's the Red Cross."

For a moment she couldn't place the reference. "The Red

Cross," she said. "The health agency?"

"If an army came, we would chop them up," said Captain

Hsiu., "But no one shoots the Red Cross. They are already in

Ubin and Tekong and Sembawang. Hundreds of them."

"With bandages and medic kits," said the cop eating rice cakes. " `Civil disaster relief.' " He began laughing.

"Shut up, you," said the captain listlessly. Rice Cakes throttled it down to a snicker.

"I never heard of the Red Cross pulling a stunt like that,"

Laura said.

"It's the globalist corporations," said Captain Hsiu, darkly.

"They wanted to buy Vienna and have us all shot. But it too expensive, and take them too long. So they buy the Red

Cross instead-an army with no guns-and kill us with kindness.

They just walk in smiling, and never walk out of

Singapore again. Dirty cowards."

The police radio squawked wildly. A mob was invading the premises of Channel Four television, at Marina Centre. Cap- tain Hsiu growled something foul in Chinese and turned it off. "I knew they attack the tellies soon or later," he said.

"What to do ... '

"We getting brand-new orders tomorrow," said the lieu- tenant, speaking for the first time. "Probably big rise in pay, too. For us, plenty busy months ahead."

"Traitor," said Captain Hsiu without passion.

The lieutenant shrugged. "Got to live, la."

"Then we've won," Laura blurted. She was realizing it, in all its scope, for the first time. Ballooning inside her. All that craziness and all that sacrifice-it had worked, somehow. Not quite the way anyone had expected-but that was politics, wasn't it? It was over. The Net had won.

"That's right," said the captain. He turned right, onto

Clemenceau Avenue.

"Then I guess there's not much point in arresting me, is there? The protest is meaningless now. And I'll never stand trial for those charges." She laughed happily.

"Maybe we book you just for the fun of it," said the lieutenant. He watched a car full of teenagers zip past, one leaning through the open window, waving a huge Singapore flag.

"Oh, no!" said the captain. "Then we must watch her make more globalist moralizing speeches."

"No way!" Laura said hastily. "I'm getting the hell out of here as soon as I can, back to my husband and baby."

Captain Hsiu paused. "You want to leave the island?"

"More than anything! Believe me."

"Could arrest her anyway," suggested the lieutenant. "Probably take two, three week for the paperwork to find her."

"Especially if we don't file it," said the snickering cop.

He started laughing through his nose.

"If you think that scares me, go right ahead," Laura said, bluffing. "Anyway, I couldn't get out now if I tried. There's no way. Martial law closed the airports."

They drove across the Clemenceau Bridge. Tanks guarded it, but they looked abandoned, and the police car cruised past without pause.

"Not to worry," said the captain. "To be rid of Laura

Webster? No sacrifice too great!" And he took her to the Yung

Soo Chim Islamic Bank.

It was an eerie reprise. They were all on the top of the bank building-the personnel of Yung Soo Chim. Up there amid the white bristling forests of microwave antennas and fat rain-stained satellite dishes.