Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Years of tailored suits and handball and complaisant massage girls. But now he looked like some kind of rat-eating terrier from a sawdust pit.

One of those Grenadian pellets was in him somewhere, oozing its milligrams of liquid fear. He knew it, anyone who saw him knew it news about the pellets had been all over

Government TV But he hadn't had time to have it located and dug out of him.

The others were avoiding him. He was bad luck.

A twin-rotored Coast Guard chopper settled to the pad. Its . wind gust scoured the building and Laura tightened the sari over her head. Bad Luck jumped to his feet and made a run for it; he was there at the door, panting, before anyone else.

When it shunted open he scrambled aboard.

Laura followed him and buckled into one of the hard plastic benches at the back. A dozen, more refugees crowded on, avoiding Bad Luck.

A tight-faced little Coast Guard sergeant in camo flight suit and helmet looked in on them. "Hey, missy," yelled the fat guy ahead of Laura. "When we getting salted almonds?" The other refugees chuckled dismally.

Power went into the rotors and the world fell away under them.

They flew southwest, through the brutal, thrusting skyscrapers of Queenstown. Then over a cluster of offshore islands with names like the bonging of gamelans: Samulun,

Merlimau, Seraya. Clumps of clotted tropical green cut with towering beachfront hotels. White, sandy shorelines cinched in by elaborate dams and jetties.

Good-bye, Singapore.

They changed course over the monsoon-ruffled waters of the Malacca Straits. It was loud inside the cabin. The passen- gers made a little hoarse, guarded conversation, but no one approached her. Laura leaned her head against the bare plastic by the little fist-sized porthole and fell into a stunned half-doze.

She came to as the chopper pulled up, yawing dizzily.

They were hovering over a cargo ship. Ships had become familiar to her at the loading docks: this was a tramp clipper, with the strange rotating wind columns that had been a big hit back in the 'teens.

Crewpeople-or rather, more refugees lurked on the deck, in a variety of rumpled skivvies.

The little sergeant came back again. She had a jelly-gun slung over her shoulder. "This is it," she shouted.

"There's no landing pad!" pointed out the fat guy.

"You jump." She slung open the cargo door. Wind gusted through. They were hovering five feet over the deck. The sergeant slapped another woman on the shoulder. "You first. Go!"

Somehow they all left. Thumping, falling, sprawling onto the gently rolling deck. Those onboard helped a little, clum- sily trying to catch them.

The last one out was Bad Luck. He tumbled out as if kicked. Then the chopper peeled away, showing them an underbelly lumpy with flotation pads. "Where are we?" Bad

Luck demanded, rubbing a bruised kneecap.

A mossy-toothed Chinese technician in a songkak hat an- swered him. "This is the Ali Khamenei. Bound for Abadan."

"Abadan!" Bad Luck screeched. "No! Not the fucking

Iranians!" People stared at him-recognizing his affliction, some began to edge away.

"Islamic Republic," the technician corrected.

"I knew it!" Bad Luck said. "They gave us to the damn Koran thumpers! They'll chop our hands off! I'll never punch deck again!"

"Calming down," advised the tech, giving Bad Luck a sidelong look.

"They sold us! They dumped us on this robot ship to starve to death!"

"Not to worry," said a hefty European woman, sensibly dressed for catastrophe in a sturdy denim work shirt and corduroy jeans. "We've examined the cargo-there's plenty of Soy Moo and Weetabix." She smirked, raising one plucked eyebrow. "And we met the ship's captain-poor little bloke!

He's got a retrovirus-no immune system left." Bad Luck went even paler.

"No! The captain has plague?"

"Who else would take such a rotten job, working all alone on this barge?" the woman said. "He's hiding now in the wheelhouse. Afraid of catching an infection from us. He's a lot more afraid of us than we are of him." She looked at

Laura curiously. "Do I know you?"

Laura looked down at the deck and muttered something about being in data processing. "Is there a phone here, la?"

"You'll have to stand in line, dearie. Everybody wants on the Net.... You kept money outside Singapore, yes? Very smart. "

"Singapore robbed us," Bad Luck grumbled.

"At least they got us out," said the European woman practically. "It's better than waiting for those voodoo canni- bals to poison us... . Or the globalist law courts... . The

Islamics aren't so bad."

Bad Luck stared at her. "They murder technicians! Anti-

Western purges!"

"That was years ago-anyway, maybe that's why they want us now! Stop fretting, eh! People like us, we can always find a place." She glanced at Laura. "You play bridge, dearie?"

Laura shook her head.

"Cribbage? Pinochle?"

"Sorry." Laura adjusted her hood.

"You getting used to the chador already?" The woman traipsed off, defeated.

Laura walked unobtrusively toward the bow, avoiding scat- tered groups of dazed, shiftless refugees. No one tried to bother her.

Around the Ali Khamenei the gray waters of the straits were full of shipping-reefers, dry-bulk carriers, pallet ships.

Korean, Chinese, Maphilindonesian, some with no flag at all, simply corporate logos.

There was real majesty in the sight. Distance-tinged blue ships, gray sea, the distant green-humped rise of Sumatra.

These straits, between the bulk of Asia and the offshore sprawl of Sumatra and Java and Borneo, had been one of the world's great routes since the dawn of civilization. The loca- tion had made Singapore; and lifting the embargoes on the island would be like unclogging a global artery.

She had been part of this, she thought. And it was no small thing. Now that she was standing alone at the bow's railing, with the primordial surging of the deck beneath her feet, she could feel what she'd done. A little moment of numinous prompting, a mystic satisfaction. She had been doing the work of the world-she could sense the subtle flow of its

Taoist tides, buoying her up, carrying her.

Standing there, shedding tension, breathing the damp mon- soon air under endless gray skies, she could no longer believe in her personal danger. She was bulletproof again.

The pirates were the ones with problems, now. The Bank's brass were all over the deck, in little conspiratorial groups, muttering and looking over their shoulders. There was a surprising number of brass on this ship-the first ones aboard, apparently. She could tell they were bosses, because they were well dressed, and snotty looking. And old.

They had that tight-stretched, spotty vampire look that came from years of Singapore's half-baked longevity treat- ments. Blood filtering, hormone therapy, vitamin-E, electric acupuncture, God knew what kind of insane black-market bullshit. Maybe they had stretched a few extra years out of their expensive meddling, but now they were going to have to go off their treatments cold-turkey. And she didn't imagine it would be easy.

At dusk, a large civilian chopper arrived with a final load of refugees. Laura stood by one of the tall, gently hissing wind columns as the refugees decamped. More top brass.

One of them was Mr. Shaw.

Laura flinched away in shock, and walked slowly toward the bow, not looking back. There must have been some kind of special arrangement, she thought-this Abadan business.

Probably Shaw and his people had set it up long ago. Singa- pore might be finished, but the top data pirates had their own survival instincts. No cheap-shot Naurus and Kiribatis for them-that was for suckers. They were headed where the oil money still ran fast and deep. The Islamic Republic was no friend of Vienna's.