Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Thinking of David was something so amazingly painful that she shut it off at once.

Then they rolled into the building, through its double walls of solid sand four feet thick, under cruel portcullises of welded iron.

The van stopped. A wait.

The European flung open the doors. "Out."

She stepped out into dazzling heat. She was in a bare arena, round baked-earth exercise yard surrounded by a twostory ring of brown fortress walls. The European led her to an iron hatchway, an armored door leading into the prison. Two guards loomed behind her. They went inside, into a hall lit by cheap sunlight pipes bracketed to the ceiling. "Showers," the

European said.

The word had an evil ring. Laura stopped in place. "I don't want to go to the showers."

"There's a toilet, too," the European offered.

She shook her head. The European looked over her shoul- der and nodded fractionally.

A club hit her from behind, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. It was as if she'd been struck by lightning. Her entire right side went numb and she fell to her knees.

Then the shock faded and pain began to seep in. True pain, not the pastel thing she'd called "pain" in the past, but a sensation truly profound, biological. She couldn't believe that that was all, that she'd simply been hit with a stick. She could already feel it, changing her life.

"Get up," he said, in the same tired voice. She got up.

They took her to the showers.

There was a prison matron there. They stripped her, and the woman did a body-cavity search, the men examining

Laura's nakedness with distant professional interest. She was pushed into the shower and handed a cake of raw lye that stank of insecticide. The water was hard and briny and wouldn't lather. It shut off before she had rinsed..

She got out. Her clothes and shoes had been stolen. The prison matron jabbed her in the buttock with five cc's of yellow fluid. She felt it sink in and sting.

The European and his two goons left, and two female goons showed up. Laura was given trousers and shirt of striped black-and-white canvas, creased and rough. She put them on, trembling. Either the injection was beginning to take effect or else she was scaring herself into the belief that it was. She felt lightheaded and sick and not far from genuine craziness.

She kept thinking that there was going to come a time when she could take a stand and demand that they kill her with her dignity intact. But they didn't seem anxious to kill her; and she didn't feel anxious to die, and she was beginning to realize that a human being could be beaten into almost anything. She didn't want to be hit again, not till she had a better grip on herself.

The matron said something in Creole French and indicated the toilet. Laura shook her head. The matron looked at her as if she were an idiot, and shrugged, and made a note on her clipboard.

Then two female goons cuffed her hands behind her back.

One of them pulled a billy club, wrapped it cleverly through the metal chain of the old-fashioned handcuffs, and levered

Laura's arms up in their sockets until she was forced to double over. They then marched her out, steering her like a grocery cart, down the hall, and up narrow stairs barred at top and bottom. Then, on the upper floor, past a long series of iron doors equipped with sliding peepholes.

They stopped at cell #31, then waited there until a turnkey showed up. It took about five minutes, and they passed the time chewing gum and wisecracking about Laura in some

Malian dialect.

The turnkey finally flung the door open and they threw her in. The door slammed. "Hey!" Laura shouted. "I'm hand- cuffed! You forgot your handcuffs!" The peephole opened and she saw a human eye and part of the bridge of a nose. It shut again.

She was in a cell. In a prison. In a fascist state. In Africa.

She began to wonder if there were worse places in the world. Could anything be worse? Yes, she thought, she could be sick.

She began to feel feverish.

An hour is:

A minute and a minute and a minute and a minute and a minute.

And a minute, and a minute, and a minute and a minute and a minute.

Then another, and another minute, and another, and yet another, and another.

And a minute, then two more minutes. Then, two more minutes.

Then, two minutes. Then, two minutes. Then a minute..

Then a similar minute. Then two more. And two more again.

That's thirty minutes so far.

So do them all over again.

Laura's cell was slightly less than four paces long and slightly more than three paces across. It was about the size of the bathroom in the place-where-she'd-used-to-live, the place she didn't allow herself to think about. Much of this space was taken up by her bunk. It had four legs of tubular steel, and a support frame of flattened iron struts. Atop the frame was a mattress of striped cotton ticking, stuffed with straw.

The mattress smelled, faintly and not completely unpleas- antly, of a stranger's long sickness. One end was lightly spattered with faded bloodstains.

There was a window hole in the wall of the cell. It was a good-sized hole, almost six inches around, the size of a drainpipe. It was approximately four feet long, bored through the massive concretized sand, and it had a crisscrossed grill of thin metal at the far end. By standing directly before the hole

Laura could see a simmering patch of yellowish desert sky.

Faint gusts of heated air sometimes rippled down the tube.

The cell had no plumbing. But she learned the routine quickly, from hearing other prisoners. You banged the door and yelled, in Malian Creole French, if you knew it. After a certain period, depending on whim, one of the guards would show and take you to the latrine: a cell much like the others, but with a hole in the floor.

She heard the screaming for the first time on her sixth day.

It seemed to be oozing up from the thick floor beneath her feet. She had never heard such inhuman screaming, not even during the riot in Singapore. There was a primal quality to it that could pass through solid barriers: concrete, metal, bone, the human skull. Compared to this howling the screams of mob panic were only a kind of gaiety.

She could not make out any words, but she could hear that there were pauses, and occasionally she thought she could hear a low electrical buzzing.

They would unlock her handcuffs for meals and for the latrine. They would then seal them up again, tightly, care- fully, high on her wrists, so she couldn't wriggle through the circle of her own arms and get her hands in front of her. As if it mattered, as if she might break free with a single bound and tear her steel door from its hinges with her fingernails.

After a week her shoulders were in a constant state of low-level pain, and she had worn raw patches on her chin and cheek from sleeping on her stomach. She did not complain, however. She had briefly spotted one of her fellow prisoners, an Asian man, Japanese she thought. He was handcuffed, his legs were fettered, and he wore a blindfold.

During the second week, they began handcuffing her hands from the front. This made an amazing difference. She felt with giddy irrationality that she had truly accomplished some- thing, that some kind of minor but definite message had been sent her from the prison administration.

Surely, she thought, as she lay waiting for sleep, 'her mind gently and luxuriously disintegrating, some mark had been made, maybe only a check on a clipboard, but some kind of institutional formality had taken place. She existed.

In the morning she convinced herself that it, could not possibly mean anything. She began doing pushups.

She kept track of days by scratching the grainy wall under her bunk with the edge of her handcuffs. On her twenty-first day she was taken out, given another shower and another body search, and taken to meet the Inspector of Prisons.